跪拜 Guibai
← Back to the summary

Cmder 2.0 RC Brings Windows Terminal Support After 17-Month Silence

On November 10, 2026, Cmder released 2.0.0-rc.1, a pre-release version.

On the same day, it also released v1.3.26, the maintenance line for 1.x, as a stable release.

The previous stable release was v1.3.25, published on May 31, 2024. That's 17 months ago.

Cmder is a console emulator for Windows. The repo was created in July 2013. As of this writing, it has 27,007 stars, 2,074 forks, 61 open issues, and 12 pending pull requests.

During those 17 months, the repository kept receiving commits, but no releases were cut, until today's simultaneous release of two lines.

The 2.0 RC bundles a large body of work that had accumulated on the development branch. The fixes to the launcher and packaging primarily come from maintainer dax, who is thanked by name in the release notes.

Cmder has always been a wrapper: its own launcher and configuration on the outside, with ConEmu serving as the terminal kernel inside.

The biggest change is that the terminal is no longer only ConEmu.

In the current packages, cmder_full uses Windows Terminal, cmder_conemu_full still uses ConEmu, and cmder_launcher lets you specify your own terminal.

Packages with nogit do not include Git for Windows. This name replaces the old mini; the 1.x package names remain unchanged.

The fixes are low-level: the launcher no longer crashes on malformed arguments or overly long configuration paths, gives a clear error when an executable path is not found, and the first-time /C initialization of Windows Terminal settings no longer overwrites existing user configuration.

The init.bat compatibility layer that long-time users rely on is still there, several TCC/TCCLE default values have been restored, the launcher's help text is now explicit, and the behavior of generated cache is documented.

Maintainers have recorded unfinished follow-up work in a separate todo list so it doesn't block the current line.

The trade-off between the two lines is straightforward: if you want to use Windows Terminal, go with the 2.0 RC.

If you only want patches and want to keep using ConEmu, install 1.3.26.

1.3.26 ships only with ConEmu, no Windows Terminal, and does not have the cache-generation architecture from 2.0. The package names are still cmder.zip and cmder_mini.zip.

Its content backports several fixes from the 2.0 line, restores four TCC/TCCLE default values, adds validation for build arguments and vendor names, and supports both ucrt64 and the older mingw64 and mingw32 directory layouts.

The bundled Git for Windows has been upgraded to 2.56.0.windows.4.

Before upgrading, two things need to be done: read docs/UPGRADING-2.0.md in the repository and back up any manually modified config/ directory.

After a project has gone 17 months without a release, releasing a stable line and a new-architecture RC on the same day shows the maintainer wants existing users to get patches first while those who want to try new things can go the RC route, without either line holding the other back.

Repository address: https://github.com/cmderdev/cmder.

Are you still using Cmder? Feel free to leave a comment.


About me: