Creating a terminal and sending text to it should not show it

[jrieken]

Creating a new terminal immediately shows it which

• gives me no way to create a terminal in background
• is different from createOutputChannel or createStatusBarItem

[jrieken]

Pushing for August since no one has yet programmed against the API and changes after that won't be possible

[Tyriar]

This is actually a non-trivial change and is related to #11275. A createInBackground?: boolean property can be added to vscode.TerminalConfiguration to keep this backwards compatible.

[Tyriar]

Are you suggesting this should create in background by default? Seems to me that the majority of use cases would want it in the foreground?

[jrieken]

Are you suggesting this should create in background by default?

For the sake of being consistent with other API (createOutputChannel, createStatusBarItem) "yes". Also it won't require the proposed createInBackground-flag thus keeping it more simple.

[jrieken]

@Tyriar I would suggest for August to internally call hide after creation. That would align the behaviour, be an easy fix, and the flickering would be along the lines of #11275

[jrieken]

Alternatively we release-note this behaviour for August - the API is correct but wrongly implemented. That would mean consumers for 1.5 have to be prepared for a behavioural change with 1.6

[Tyriar]

@jrieken while calling hide immediately works for createTerminal, it does not for sendText which also forces the display of the terminal. Changing the latter is a more high risk change, I'm going to make a note in vscode.d.ts indicating that it will be changed as the release notes defer to the docs.

[Tyriar]

Set the PR to August, moving this to September for the real fix.

[Tyriar]

This was done via #11839 and subsequent fixes with one caveat; if the terminal panel is not initialized, the output will not be retained. So the process will run fine, just output will not be kept until Terminal.show is invoked at least once. The upstream issue tracking this is xtermjs/xterm.js#266

[jrieken]

@Tyriar We still have the doc comments about changes in 1.6 in vscode.d.ts

[Tyriar]

Done, I just removed it and didn't elaborate on it not showing the terminal as that's consistent with createOutputChannel.