Nx 22.1 Release: Terminal UI on Windows, Storybook 10, Vitest 4, and more!

Hot on the heels of our Nx 22 release, we're back with 22.1 packed with improvements that make your daily development experience even better. This release delivers on a long-awaited promise for Windows users, upgrades our testing ecosystem, and sets the stage for Angular 21 support.

Terminal UI now available on Windows

When we launched the Terminal UI in Nx 21, we had to disable it on Windows due to compatibility issues. We know that was frustrating for Windows developers who watched their Mac and Linux colleagues enjoy the improved task running experience.

Nx 22.1 enables the Terminal UI by default on Windows. You now get the great TUI experience: a task list panel showing all running tasks, log output for your selected task in a separate panel, and smooth navigation between tasks using arrow keys or Vim-style h/j/k/l bindings.

Screenshot of Nx Terminal UI showing a task list on the left and log output on the right.

This is especially valuable when working with continuous tasks. Running your frontend that depends on a backend server? Both tasks appear in your task list, and you can easily switch between their logs without losing context.

Storybook 10 support with AI-powered migrations

Storybook 10 arrived with a significant change: it's ESM-only. This simplifies their distribution and reduces install size by 29%, but it means your Storybook configuration and stories need to be valid ESM.

@nx/storybook has generated valid ESM configurations and stories for a few years now, but you may have older code that needs to be migrated to ESM. This is a tricky problem to solve with our typical approach to migration using AST-based codemods. We've chosen to apply AI to this problem.

When you run nx migrate latest, your Storybook packages will be updated like usual, but we'll also generate AI agent instructions to help convert your code from CommonJS to ESM. You can run those instructions with your AI agent of choice to finish the migration. As always when working with AI, verify any changes made by the agent. The Storybook team has provided some guidance on this migration to help verify, or if you need to handle the migration manually.

We're excited to apply these AI-powered migrations to other tools going forward. We always aim to make migrations as smooth as possible, but there are some things that we just can't accomplish in an automated way. Providing instructions for agents shows promise as a way of improving migrations going forward and even accomplishing migrations that would have been completely manual before.

If you're not ready to migrate to Storybook 10 yet, Storybook 9 remains fully supported. See our documentation on customizing migrations to learn how.

Vitest gets its own plugin

Vitest has been split out into a dedicated @nx/vitest plugin, separate from @nx/vite. This cleaner separation makes it easier to use Vitest independently and sets us up for better feature development going forward.

The new plugin brings Vitest 4 support and atomizer support for Vitest. If you're not familiar with atomization, it's how Nx automatically splits your test suite by file for better CI distribution. A test task that takes 10 minutes can be split into multiple smaller tasks that run in parallel across your runners, dramatically reducing your Time to Green.

We will continue to support the use of Vitest via the @nx/vite plugin until the release of Nx v23. You should follow the migration guide to move to @nx/vitest before then.

Next.js v16 support

For teams using Next.js, we've added support for Next.js v16. New workspaces will use v16 out of the box, but existing workspaces will continue to use their existing version. Nx does not currently include an automated migration to v16. To upgrade now, you can follow this migration guide from the Next.js team.

However, like the Storybook 10 migration, we'll soon be providing AI agent instructions based on this migration guide. Watch for this update soon!

Cypress v15 support

For teams using Cypress, we've added support for Cypress v15. Update your workspace and you'll be ready to use the latest Cypress features.

Coming soon: Angular 21 support

Angular 21 landed on November 20, and it's a significant release. The Nx team is actively preparing support, which you can expect in an upcoming 22.2 release. We're especially excited to see Vitest as the default test runner, which means new Angular projects will use Vitest instead of Karma. This aligns perfectly with our new @nx/vitest plugin and atomizer support. Angular teams will get fast, parallelizable tests with great Nx Cloud integration from day one.

We'll have more to share as Angular 21 support lands. Look for it soon!