Windows

Windows is a supported platform with full feature parity, though several subsystems require platform-specific implementations and workarounds due to differences in the terminal model, filesystem, and input handling.

ConPTY Terminal Backend

The embedded terminal uses ConPTY (Windows Console Pseudo Terminal) via the portable-pty crate. ConPTY is the modern Windows equivalent of Unix PTY, available on Windows 10 1809+ and all Windows 11 versions.

Shell Detection

AZUREAL detects the available shell in preference order:

pwsh.exe – PowerShell 7+ (cross-platform PowerShell)
powershell.exe – Windows PowerShell 5.1 (ships with Windows)
cmd.exe – Command Prompt (fallback)

The first available shell is used. PowerShell 7+ is preferred because it supports modern terminal features and ANSI escape sequences more reliably than the legacy Windows PowerShell.

Enter Key Behavior

PowerShell expects carriage return (\r) rather than line feed (\n) for line submission. AZUREAL sends \r when the Enter key is pressed in the embedded terminal on Windows. This is transparent to the user but differs from the Unix behavior where Enter sends \n.

Terminal Title Reassertion

Claude Code CLI calls SetConsoleTitle() during execution, which overwrites AZUREAL’s terminal title. AZUREAL reasserts its own title (AZUREAL @ <project> : <branch>) after every draw frame, ensuring the title stays correct both during and after agent execution.

CUDA GPU Whisper with MSVC Fixes

Whisper runs on the CUDA GPU on Windows, providing GPU-accelerated transcription (requires an NVIDIA GPU and the CUDA Toolkit). The whisper-rs crate requires additional patches to compile with the MSVC toolchain:

Layout tests disabled – MSVC produces different struct layouts than GCC/ Clang, causing layout assertion failures in the vendored whisper.cpp bindings. These tests are disabled on Windows.
Enum type fixes – Certain C enum types require explicit size annotations to match MSVC’s default enum representation.

These fixes are applied in AZUREAL’s vendored copy of whisper-rs and do not affect runtime behavior.

Build Dependencies

winget install LLVM.LLVM Kitware.CMake Ninja-build.Ninja Nvidia.CUDA

After installing LLVM, set the LIBCLANG_PATH environment variable:

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("LIBCLANG_PATH", "C:\Program Files\LLVM\bin", "User")

Set CMAKE_GENERATOR=Ninja in your environment so CMake uses Ninja instead of the Visual Studio generator (required for correct CUDA include path propagation).

Restart your terminal after setting these variables.

Alt Key Bindings

Windows uses Alt as the modifier for destructive or significant actions, rather than Cmd (macOS) or Ctrl (Linux). This avoids conflicts with the Windows console input system, where Ctrl+C is intercepted by the console host before it reaches the application.

Keybinding	Action
Alt+C	Cancel running agent
Alt+A	Archive current worktree

Standard Ctrl bindings that do not conflict with the console (Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z) work normally.

No Kitty Keyboard Protocol

The Kitty keyboard protocol is not enabled on Windows. Windows Terminal’s implementation of the protocol conflicts with mouse event reporting, causing mouse clicks and scrolling to be misinterpreted. AZUREAL uses the standard Win32 console input API instead, which provides adequate key and mouse event reporting for all features.

This means that certain ambiguous key combinations (Tab vs Ctrl+I, Enter vs Ctrl+M) cannot be distinguished on Windows. AZUREAL’s keybinding system accounts for this by avoiding these ambiguous bindings.

No fast_draw_input()

The fast_draw_input() optimization (direct VT escape sequence writes to bypass ratatui’s draw call) is not available on Windows. Direct VT writes conflict with the Windows console input parser, which processes VT sequences differently than Unix terminal emulators.

All rendering on Windows goes through the standard terminal.draw() path. The ~18ms draw latency is acceptable on Windows because there is no competing fast-path expectation.

Path Canonicalization

Windows paths returned by std::fs::canonicalize() include the \\?\ extended- length prefix (e.g., \\?\C:\Users\name\project). This prefix is valid but causes issues with tools that do not expect it.

AZUREAL uses the dunce crate to strip the \\?\ prefix from canonicalized paths, producing standard C:\Users\name\project paths throughout the application. This ensures compatibility with git, Claude Code CLI, and any other external tools invoked by AZUREAL.

AZUREAL Manual