Wintty and Windows Terminal: the differences

Windows Terminal is Microsoft's terminal; it ships with Windows 11. Wintty is an independent Windows terminal built on the Ghostty core. Both cover the basics: tabs, panes, themes, a command palette. This page is about what remains after that: sessions, multiplexing, deployment, Group Policy, and rendering, ending with the cases where Windows Terminal is still the right choice.

The short version

Session persistence

Windows Terminal 1.21 added session restore. Turn on "Open windows from a previous session" and it reopens your tabs at launch, with the contents of the screen restored alongside them. What comes back is text: restored tabs run new shell processes, and the programs you had open are gone.

Wintty Pro keeps the session outside the window: in winttyd, a per-user daemon that starts at logon. Close Wintty, or let an update replace it, and the daemon keeps the sessions and their programs running. Reopen and reattach with layout and scrollback. New tabs are persistent by default, the winttyc command drives sessions from scripts and other terminals, and the secrets a session carries are encrypted on disk for your account.

The boundary, stated plainly: Wintty sessions survive closing the app and app updates. A Windows reboot ends them and their programs, and no terminal restores a running process after one.

Multiplexing

Both terminals do tabs and splits. The difference is what owns the panes. In Windows Terminal, panes belong to the window; close it and they close with it. In Wintty Pro, the pane tree is part of the session and the daemon stores it: open the sessions picker in another window, confirm the takeover, and the session moves there with its splits, sizes, and scrollback.

It is the model tmux users know, where the session is the unit rather than the window, except the daemon is installed and started for you and there are no prefix keys to learn.

Deployment

Windows Terminal ships as MSIX: preinstalled on Windows 11, available from the Microsoft Store on Windows 10, and published as winget and .msixbundle downloads on GitHub. For a fleet, that means managing a Store app or wrapping the MSIX for Win32-style deployment; Microsoft publishes no MSI for it.

Wintty Pro Enterprise is a per-machine MSI built on WiX 5. It installs to Program Files\Wintty, upgrades in place, and writes HKLM\Software\Wintty\Install with an InstallVariant of Enterprise and an InstallVersion carrying the release version, which is what an Intune or SCCM detection rule reads. Uninstall removes the key. Licensing is contact-based.

Central management

Microsoft publishes official administrative templates for Windows Terminal: since Preview 1.22, each GitHub release carries a GroupPolicyTemplates zip with WindowsTerminal.admx. The documented policies cover disabled profile sources, the language models allowed in Terminal Chat, and the default terminal application, which is user-scoped and implemented as a preference.

Wintty ships no ADMX or ADML template today. The client reads six managed settings from the SOFTWARE\Policies\Wintty registry keys: DefaultProfile, UpdateChannel (stable, beta, tip, or none, where none turns auto-update off), AllowedShells, DisableContextMenu, LogPath, and RequireDefaultTerminalHandoff. A fleet sets them with Group Policy registry preferences, Intune, or SCCM. Precedence runs HKLM policy, HKCU policy, user preference, config file, defaults, so an admin can lock a setting and a user cannot unwrap it. RequireDefaultTerminalHandoff forces the default terminal machine-wide, and the client refuses to write the nil-GUID value that would point the handoff at nothing. The Windows Terminal template documents no policy for updates.

Rendering and old hardware

Windows Terminal runs about anywhere: Windows 10 and 11, machines with old graphics hardware, Remote Desktop sessions. Wintty's standard renderer wants a DirectX 12 GPU and checks for feature level 12_0 at startup; on a machine that cannot, it explains and exits rather than opening a blank pane. Pro Legacy is the answer there: a DirectX 11 renderer that falls back to WARP, Microsoft's CPU rasterizer, which is what makes Remote Desktop sessions work. It is included with Pro. Pro Legacy is tested on Windows 11; Windows 10 is untested.

Where Windows Terminal is the right choice

If you want a terminal that is already installed, Windows Terminal is the one. It ships with Windows 11 as its default terminal, it is built and supported by Microsoft, it is open source under the MIT license with a large community behind its repository, and it is free with nothing to buy or sponsor. It runs on hardware and in sessions where Wintty needs Pro Legacy. When those are your constraints, use it.

The reasons to pick Wintty are the rows above: sessions that keep running when the app closes or updates, a pane tree that moves between windows, an MSI and registry-key management under SOFTWARE\Policies\Wintty for fleets, and a renderer built for DirectX 12 GPUs. If those are not your problems, Windows Terminal already does the job.

Getting Wintty

The tier split behind the table's Pro labels: persistent sessions, read aloud, and streamer mode are Pro features; Pro Enterprise adds the MSI; Pro Legacy adds the DirectX 11 renderer. The tiers page compares them all.

Nothing is published yet: the source is free to build, and signed installers will be a thank you for sponsors. The download page lists the current paths.