On the Windows Command Line blog, Windows product manager Hamza Usmani calls it the biggest update since launch. That's Microsoft's own description. The GitHub release page lists the build as Intelligent Terminal v0.3.3083.0 under the tag v0.3, and its notes back up the blog's main claims while adding a lot of detail the blog skipped.
First, what is Intelligent Terminal?
If you haven't tried it, the project's GitHub repository describes it as an experimental fork of Windows Terminal with native agent integration. The usual Terminal features carry over: tabs, profiles, themes, settings, shells, and keyboard shortcuts, which all work the way you expect.
The repository README also lists the requirements, which the 0.3 announcement doesn't mention:
- OS: Intelligent Terminal requires Windows 10 2004 (19041) or later.
- Agent access: You also need a supported agent CLI and subscription. GitHub Copilot is the default.
You can install 0.3 three ways: from the Microsoft Store, with winget install Microsoft.IntelligentTerminal, or from the GitHub release page. Microsoft still calls the product experimental and asks for bug reports and feature requests through the repository. Expect some rough edges.
Section summary: This is a Windows Terminal fork built around AI agents. It runs on Windows 10 2004 and later, it's still experimental, and you need an agent CLI with a subscription to get much out of it.
The sidebar: tabs get room to breathe
Microsoft says the horizontal tab bar was too cramped once agents were involved. A tab titled "copilot" tells you nothing about whether that agent is busy, stuck, or asking permission to delete your node_modules. The new sidebar lists shells and agent CLI sessions together vertically, with space for more than a truncated title.
The basics haven't changed: click to select, ?? to close, drag to reorder, and right-click for the tab menu. Here's what's new:
- Live agent status on each tab, with an attention dot when an agent is waiting for you
- Pinning from the right-click menu, which keeps a tab at the top of the list
- Split panes nested under their parent tab, so you can go straight to a specific pane
- Global search across open tabs and recent agent sessions
- An Agents only filter
- A collapsible Recent agent sessions section, which includes agents running in other Terminal windows
Don't like it? Here's how to go back
The sidebar is on by default. To get horizontal tabs back, use either of these:
- Right-click any tab and choose Switch to horizontal tabs, or
- Go to Settings > Appearance > Tab Layout.
The release notes say the switch doesn't need a restart. You can resize the sidebar or collapse it with the sidebar button or Ctrl+Shift+S. Acrylic is also on by default. For a solid background, turn off Use acrylic material in the tab row under Settings > Appearance.
Existing users can relax a bit. When the sidebar-first choice was added to first-run setup, the pull request said Sidebar is selected only when the user has no explicit tab layout; existing preferences and the global Horizontal default remain unchanged. The 0.3 notes say the same thing: there's a one-time introduction to the layouts, and layout choices you make later are kept.
Keyboard shortcuts
The release notes list these shortcuts, which the blog post doesn't cover:
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Enter or toggle the sidebar | Ctrl+Shift+S |
| Search the sidebar (or the horizontal tab-search palette) | Ctrl+F |
| Cycle through displayed open tabs | Ctrl+Alt+Up / Down |
| Toggle Agents only | Ctrl+Shift+G |
| Open recent sessions | Ctrl+Shift+/ |
Tab and arrow keys move focus through sidebar rows without switching terminals, and Enter activates the selected row. That fix matters. A bug filed during development reported that in sidebar search Tab reaches the first result, but input focus also jumps into that result's terminal pane. Keyboard-only users couldn't get past the first result. The 0.3 notes say navigating and activating are now separate actions.
Section summary: The sidebar is the default for new setups, existing preferences are kept, and switching back to horizontal tabs takes one right-click.
Rich tabs: two fields, your choice
By default, each tab shows its status and current working directory. When a tab is running an agent CLI, the shell icon changes to the agent's icon and the status line shows the agent's latest activity: working, waiting for input, or asking to run a tool.
Click the filter icon in the tab header to choose different fields:
- Agent status
- Current working directory
- Git information: repository, branch, or changes
You can show two fields at most. Turning on a third replaces one of the others. That's a sensible limit, since nobody needs six lines of metadata under every tab. The release notes also mention a performance detail: hidden Git fields don't trigger Git queries, so turning off branch info actually saves work.
Section summary: Pick two of agent status, working directory, or Git details, and Git queries only run for fields you've turned on.
Search, filters and recent sessions
Sidebar search covers everything at once: open tabs in the current window, agent sessions open in any window, and sessions you've already closed. The release notes add that search includes items hidden by your current filters, and clearing the search restores your chosen view.
Agents only limits the list to tabs running an agent CLI. Recent agent sessions adds a collapsible list showing each session's title, working directory, and relative timestamp, plus markers for sessions in another window or running in the background.
What happens when you select a recent session depends on the session. According to the release notes, Intelligent Terminal will do one of three things:
- focus the live pane if it knows where the session is running,
- restore a retained (headless) tab, or
- start a supported resume flow.
That word "supported" is doing real work. Don't assume every old session can be resumed; that depends on the agent CLI. The notes also say Intelligent Terminal no longer blocks resuming a session marked "In use." The agent CLI now decides whether it can handle concurrent access.
Section summary: Search covers past and present sessions across windows, but whether an old session can be resumed depends on the agent CLI.
Agent CLIs on the new-tab menu
Intelligent Terminal already detected supported agent CLIs. In 0.3 it also creates profiles for them, so you can launch GitHub Copilot CLI, Claude, or another detected agent from the new-tab menu just like PowerShell. The release notes list the auto-generated profiles: Copilot, Claude, Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, and Antigravity. Google Antigravity is newly supported in this release.
Some limits from the release notes:
- Windows installs only. WSL installations of these CLIs don't get native profiles generated automatically.
- Custom menus are left alone. If you've customized your new-tab menu layout, it stays as it is. Otherwise, the agent profiles appear in their own group after your regular shell profiles.
- They're separate from the Agent Pane. These profiles run each agent's own interactive interface directly, independently of Agent Pane ACP connections. You can edit or copy them, choose a model, or supply your own command line.
- Antigravity caveat. Microsoft says Antigravity can still run into upstream DLL-loading failures on some enterprise Windows systems. IT admins, take note.
Section summary: Installed agent CLIs now show up as ready-made profiles, but only for Windows installs, and custom menu layouts aren't touched.
Headless mode, and what it doesn't do
Microsoft's pitch is easy to like. A long agent task or build used to die when you closed the window. Now you can right-click a tab and choose Turn on headless mode. The label was renamed during development; the pull request describes renaming the tab context-menu actions to Turn on headless mode and Turn off headless mode, without changing tab retention behavior.
The release notes say the whole tab and all its existing panes stay alive. Headless tabs appear in the sidebar and, when no windows are open, in the system tray, where you can restore or close them.
There's a catch. The blog says the session runs until the machine stops. The release notes are more precise: this is live-process retention, and it does not survive the app exiting or a reboot. Think of it as "don't kill this when I close the window," not as a background service.
A separate feature, startup layout restoration, rebuilds supported layouts and conversations after a restart, but the release notes say it doesn't preserve the old processes. So headless mode keeps work running while the app is still running, and restoration rebuilds your workspace afterwards. Neither will finish a build for you after Windows Update reboots your PC overnight.
Wording may change in later builds. A later pull request changes the tray's "Close all keep-running tabs" to "Close all headless tabs" in both English locales, preserving the resource key, English translator comments, encoding, line endings, and all close/restore behavior. If your tray menu doesn't match the 0.3 notes, that's probably why.
Section summary: Headless mode keeps a tab running after you close its window, but not after the app exits or the PC reboots.
Other changes worth noting
The blog focuses on the sidebar, but the release notes include other improvements to the Agent Pane:
- Undo/redo in drafts with Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, plus click-to-place caret
- Screenshot pasting through normal Paste, with the existing Alt+V path kept
- Markdown rendering of completed replies, on by default. Code syntax highlighting isn't included.
- Queued follow-up messages, which are held in memory only. The notes admit there's no UI yet to recover or discard stopped requests.
- Right-to-left UI improvements for Arabic and Hebrew
- Fixes for PowerShell integration loading after customizations like Oh My Posh, and for Git for Windows 2.55+ metadata failures
Analysis: who is this for?
My view: the sidebar fixes a real problem. A horizontal tab strip worked when each tab was a shell you were typing into. It works badly when several tabs are autonomous agents, any of which might be waiting for you to approve a tool call. Status lines and attention dots are essentially a monitoring dashboard built into the Terminal.
There are tradeoffs. The sidebar takes horizontal space, which matters on laptops and when you're splitting panes. Microsoft has kept the way back to horizontal tabs easy. Headless mode is useful, but its name may suggest more than it delivers. Developers used to tmux or nohup should treat it as a convenience while the app is running, not as reliable background execution. Admins should keep in mind that this is experimental software that launches third-party agent CLIs, each with its own subscription and permission model.
Bottom line
Intelligent Terminal 0.3 is a big upgrade for anyone running several coding agents on Windows. The main changes:
- A default-on vertical sidebar with live agent status, nested panes, pinning, and search across windows
- A choice of two metadata fields per tab, including Git details
- Auto-generated new-tab profiles for six agent CLIs (Windows installs only, not WSL)
- Headless mode that keeps tabs running after you close the window, but not through an app exit or reboot
If you prefer horizontal tabs, one right-click switches back. If you've been juggling five agents in a narrow tab strip, the sidebar should make that much easier.