Terminal: Other options for overriding profile starting directory

[krage]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

The new command line arg for specifying starting directory is great but it's limited to individual panes and tabs created during launch. I'd like additional ways of specifying starting directories for panes/tabs, particularly those that get created after launch. Here's two additions I think would be useful:

Window-wide starting directory command line argument

Starting a terminal with wt --windowStartingDirectory "c:\my\project\dir" would cause all tabs/panes opened during the life of that terminal window to start in c:\my\project\dir. This is useful for opening a terminal window directly in a deeply nested project directory and then quickly and easily opening/closing additional panes/tabs in that location. This should also apply to all panes/tabs created via initial command line args that don't have an individual --startingDirectory specified.

You can more or less achieve this right now by setting a profile's starting directory to . and starting wt.exe itself with the actual desired starting directory as working directory. However this requires a more complicated launch, eg. cmd /C start /D "c:\my\project\dir" wt. You also lose the ability to keep a useful default starting directory in the profile's settings for a simple launch of wt.exe.

newTab and splitPane keybind options for reusing current directory

An additional option for the newTab/splitPane keybindings could open these with starting directory set to the current working directory of the current tab/pane. Useful if you open a terminal, eventually cd to some directory, and then want additional panes/tabs in that directory.

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These would be additions to a prioritized list where the tab/pane being created uses the highest priority starting directory that was provided, eg:

1. reuse current directory via keybind
2. --startingDirectory command line argument
3. --windowStartingDirectory command line argument
4. profile starting directory
5. wt.exe working directory

[DHowett-MSFT]

For newTab and splitPane, that's tracked by #3158. For windowStartingDirectory, I'm not sure I agree that Terminal should be the arbiter here: it seems like the issue is more correctly solved by fixing #878 (it's closed, but I do not know how I feel about that) or setting the startingDirectory in all your profiles to null (which is easily doable with the defaults key) and then simply starting WT in the desired directory. It's never going to be perfect, but neither is a big-hammer global override switch.

I'm concerned about the veritable pandora's box of features that opens up as well: if we can override startingDirectory at an app level for all profiles started under a window, why not padding? background image? But then, why have a profile system at all?

This likely warrants further discussion. :smile:

[krage]

I hadn't seen #3158 when I was looking around, that appears to cover newTab and splitPane.

I think you're right adding windowStartingDirectory as a global override of profile-specific settings would be an overreach and potentially confusing.

The startingDirectory behavior I'm kind of emulating is tmux usage where there are various means of controlling the working directory of a session both at and after launch. With terminal I have all of my profiles' startingDirectory set to "." (the provided json schema warns if I specify a non-string and this seems to work for inheriting terminal's working directory, though it appears null also works as you suggest). I find the ergonomics currently aren't great though in both lacking a configurable default and necessitating launching via cmd.exe/powershell.exe etc. to specify a working directory in various other circumstances.

For defaults, just launching from the standard shortcut in start menu / task bar uses c:\windows\system32 (virtually never useful to me) whereas typing wt in the windows run dialog starts in %USERPROFILE% (better, but not the default I actually want). I'm not actually sure if there's a clean way to change the working directory used when launching via task bar at all. I can create my own shortcut to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\wt.exe, give that a starting directory and pin it to the task bar... but terminal instances unfortunately aren't grouped under that taskbar icon.

Maybe a better approach that still covers what I'm hoping for would be an optional defaultWorkingDirectory in the global settings that could be overridden by an optional --workingDirectory command line arg?

[waahoo]

In Ubuntu, when I press ctrl+alt+T, the terminal will launch at user home. Additionally, I can launch the terminal at current directory by context menu "Open in terminal. I would like windows terminal can do the same whether or not by overriding profile starting directory. That is "launch from task bar will be atuser home` and context menu for current directory".

[zadjii-msft]

@waahoo you might be interested in #878. Specifically, this: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/878#issuecomment-579508860, and the PR #3547, and the investigation that was done in that PR.