newTab on current path

[trajano]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

When opening a new tab AND OPTIONALLY if the current program in the active shell is not the shell program, use the current path of the active shell as the default path for the newTab action.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

There should be an option for this. useCurrentPath in globals which takes in a string of "never", "always", "whenNotShell"

[DHowett-MSFT]

This is one of those things that is impossible in the general case but technically possible. There's a lot of intricacies here, like:

cmd
powershell
cd d:\users

well, powershell isn't the first process we launched. we'd ignore the path d:\users

(in powershell)
cd d:\users

we'd ignore d:\users because powershell doesn't actually set the current working directory (!!)

If your "shell" is ssh dustin@example.com (where we strictly define shell to be "the first process Terminal spawns on your behalf"), its working directory is always going to be C:\windows\system32 regardless of what the remote working directory is.

I'd rather not provide the feature than provide the feature with so many caveats that they'd fill a documentation page. ☹️ sorry.

[DHowett-MSFT]

Thanks, nonetheless, for the suggestion. We'll keep thinking about this.

[trajano]

Hmm that's kind of odd. I would think it's just a matter of reading the process' current directory https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/nf-winbase-getcurrentdirectory and calling https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/processthreadsapi/nf-processthreadsapi-createprocessw with the directory (then again I haven't traversed through the code base yet).

The part I don't know the API for would likely be trying to determine the process itself which I think should be possible because ProcExp shows the following tree

But then even the example above if I used git bash it will be in the wrong folder if you're looking at the first process under conhost.exe