Terminal: Add support for touchscreen selection

Created on 28 Mar 2020  路  7Comments  路  Source: microsoft/terminal

Description of the new feature/enhancement


I'm a Surface pro user and sometimes need to use CLI tools without bothering to pick up the keyboard (although it's a mess to type with on-screen keyboard), but it turns out that Windows Terminal is not optimized for touchscreen at all.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)


As far as I can tell, the following need to be implemented:

  1. Automatically popup on-screen keyboard and resize the window to fit it on touch.
  2. Long press to select/copy/paste.
  3. Zoom with finger gestures (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/3149)
Area-Input Area-TerminalControl Issue-Task Product-Terminal

Most helpful comment

@diligamer do you speak for all developers?

All 7 comments

Not Useful For Developers

@diligamer do you speak for all developers?

@DHowett-MSFT Well, Most Developers Don't Use Touchscreens.

@diligamer Ah yes, but _some_ developers _do_ use touchscreens, so we shouldn't discount the opinion of a minority of users based solely on the fact that they're a minority.


Back on topic, I could have sworn that @leonMSFT actually already implemented having the on-screen keyboard appear when you tap on the Terminal. @dianlujitao what verison of the Terminal are you using?

I'm fine with leaving this open to track "Long press to select/copy/paste.", since

  • "Automatically popup on-screen keyboard and resize the window to fit it on touch." _should_ already work
  • "Zoom with finger gestures" is already being tracked by #3149.

The on-screen keyboard still seems to work as of ver. 0.11.842 on my surface book when i detach my screen FYI!

The on-screen keyboard still seems to work as of ver. 0.11.842 on my surface book when i detach my screen FYI!

Yes! That works for me too. I would have thought just turning on tablet mode might be enough, but this is OK.

However, even with the screen detached, I can't get touch to work for mouse click operations. For example, when using the Linux dialog utility, it doesn't seem to register taps on the dialog buttons.

Yes, can confirm that on-screen keyboard works after turning on tablet mode as @j4james mentioned

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