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Take Command v36.52

Written by Rex Conn on . Posted in Releases.

Take Command 36.50: A foundational overhaul

Version 36.50 delivered some of the most significant under-the-hood changes Take Command has ever seen. ConPTY tabs no longer render text through GDI — they now use DirectWrite/Direct2D, which means sharper, smoother text with sub-pixel ClearType anti-aliasing. This is especially noticeable on high-DPI displays.

Other visual enhancements include background images, Windows Terminal color scheme support, additional menu and theme options, and expanded ANSI / VT support.

Beyond the visual improvement, the switch delivered a 20-30% speedup in display output thanks to GPU acceleration, scales cleanly across different resolutions and DPI levels, and adds support for OpenType features like ligatures and swashes — plus better Unicode handling for multilingual text, emoji, and surrogate pairs.

36.50 added a Plugin Manager, including plugin support for TCEdit and the batch debugger, and Shell Integration in Take Command, including command folding, prompt marks, keyboard jumping between commands, and command output selection.

Take Command 36.51 and 36.52:

So, how did we improve Take Command with 36.51 and 36.52?

·       Even faster (another 20%, using D3D) and cleaner text output.

·       Take Command can now record ConPTY sessions in the widely supported asciicast v2 format — a UTF-8 .cast file capturing terminal size, timestamps, and every input/output event, including ANSI/VT escape sequences, special-key sequences, Unicode and bracketed-paste input, and text inserted via drag-and-drop or filename insertion. Recordings play back directly in Take Command in a dedicated read-only tab, with a control bar for run/pause, ten-second seek forward/backward, and rewind-to-start — or open them in any external asciicast-compatible player.

·       Per-monitor DPI awareness. Take Command now automatically adjusts fonts, toolbars, menus, and dialogs as you move the application between monitors with different DPI settings — no more blurry text or mis-scaled dialogs after dragging a window to a second display.

·       The scrollback search experience has also been overhauled with a new search bar: incremental highlighting as you type, active-match highlighting, match counts, automatic viewport navigation, Match Case / Regex modes, and light/dark theming. A dedicated Cmd mode groups matches by command block rather than raw row and automatically expands folded blocks when you navigate to them.

·       Shell integration marks (OSC 133/633) now let the scrollback buffer recognize command boundaries, so you can right-click within a command's output to Copy Command, Copy Output, or Rerun Command directly.

·       More shell integration support, including clickable hyperlinks, iTerm2 and SIXEL inline images, and expanded mouse-tracking mode.

·       Long-running builds, downloads, and backups no longer require continuously monitoring a terminal tab. Take Command's ConPTY tabs can now optionally display a native Windows desktop toast notification whenever a shell command sends an OSC 9 or OSC 777 escape sequence.  Notifications only fire for tabs that aren't currently active, so you're never interrupted by an alert for the tab you're already watching. Clicking a toast jumps straight to the originating tab.

And much more than we can cover here. For a complete list of the new features in 36.0 - 36.52, see What's New in Version 36 in the help.