Windows is supported starting from either Windows 10 version 1703 (the Creators Update, released in April 2017) or Windows Server 2016.
[NOTE!] Windows 8 and earlier are not supported!
On Windows, Tcell uses the modern VT API for console applications, including the win32-input-mode to give
advanced key reporting. However, in order to receive resize notifications, the ReadConsoleInput API is
used even while in VT input mode.
On Windows we use 24-bit color by default.
Our preferred terminal emulator on Windows 11 is actually the modern Windows Terminal, which can also be used as a portable application. This is the main test target we use, and the one we recommend if problems are encountered using third party applications.
We have tested Alacritty and found it to work reasonably well, including support for modern key reporting, mouse events, and bracketed paste, although its support support for advanced Unicode features is limited.
We have also tested WezTerm, Termius, Putty, and MobaXterm. These appear to work reasonably for remote sessions, but do not support the newer keyboard protocols, and may not work well for local sessions at all.
Termius in particular gave a poor experience when used for local sessions, and we would not recommend it.
While historically popular, we cannot recommend ConEmu or mintty. These applications have not kept pace with modern APIs nor modern terminal standards, and we found their experience suboptimal.
Unfortunately, we have found that some features (particularly the rich keyboard support) are degraded when using SSH from a Windows Terminal (and probably other terminals as well!) to a remote host. It appears that the full win32-input-mode is captured and refactored into legacy VT style encodings, which can result in old-school issues such as the inability to to distinguish CTRL-I from TAB. This appears to be something done by the Windows SSH or terminal application and is nothing we can fix.
It’s likely that WSL will suffer these limitations as well.
Further, you’ll probably need to request 24-bit color explicitly by setting COLORTERM=truecolor in your
environment, as this is not typically done for Windows terminals as it is for Posix terminals.
Note that Alacritty has support for the full key bindings both locally and remotely. Others may as well. WezTerm, while not great locally, performed quite well as an SSH client, with complete support for all various modern keyboard featuers, bracketed paste, and good Unicode support.
Another option might be to run an X11 server (such as MobaXterm) and then remotely display a Linux terminal application such as Ghostty or Kitty.