Terminals sessions should not be deleted when starting a new conversation

[verdverm]

Type: Bug

Start a chat, have it run a command, start a new chat, it's gone and you lose the content and history...

They should persist and I should decide when they can be deleted

This prevents me from starting a long running process and then moving on to other work, without having Copilot kill my process

Extension version: 0.30.1
VS Code version: Code 1.103.0 (Universal) (e3550cf, 2025-08-06T21:40:10.271Z)
OS version: Darwin arm64 24.5.0
Modes:
Remote OS version: Linux x64 6.8.0-71-generic
Remote OS version: Linux x64 4.18.0-553.40.1.el8_10.x86_64

System Info

Item	Value
CPUs	Apple M2 (8 x 2400)
GPU Status	2d_canvas: enabled direct_rendering_display_compositor: disabled_off_ok gpu_compositing: enabled multiple_raster_threads: enabled_on opengl: enabled_on rasterization: enabled raw_draw: disabled_off_ok skia_graphite: enabled_on trees_in_viz: disabled_off video_decode: enabled video_encode: enabled webgl: enabled webgl2: enabled webgpu: enabled webnn: disabled_off
Load (avg)	2, 2, 2
Memory (System)	24.00GB (0.07GB free)
Process Argv	--crash-reporter-id 8afebd5d-2921-4fd0-90cf-a03651ab2ed9
Screen Reader	no
VM	0%

Item	Value
Remote	SSH: nitrogen
OS	Linux x64 6.8.0-71-generic
CPUs	AMD Ryzen 9 PRO 8945HS w/ Radeon 780M Graphics (16 x 400)
Memory (System)	60.61GB (56.40GB free)
VM	0%

Item	Value
Remote	SSH: dev-tony.ferrum-dev
OS	Linux x64 4.18.0-553.40.1.el8_10.x86_64
CPUs	Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU @ 2.80GHz (2 x 0)
Memory (System)	7.51GB (3.09GB free)
VM	0%

A/B Experiments

vsliv368cf:30146710
binariesv615:30325510
nativeloc1:31344060
dwcopilot:31170013
dwoutputs:31242946
copilot_t_ci:31333650
e5gg6876:31282496
pythoneinst12:31285622
996jf627:31283433
pythonrdcb7:31342333
usemplatestapi:31297334
747dc170:31275177
aj953862:31281341
9d2cg352:31346308
convertlamdat:31368659
usemarketplace:31343026
nesew2to5:31336538
agentclaude:31335814
replacestringexc:31350595
nes-set-on:31340697
6abeh943:31336334
yijiwantestdri0626-t:31336930
0927b901:31350571
4gdec884:31348710
45650338:31358607
0cj2b977:31352657
0574c672:31362109
gemagent1cf:31368470
cloudbuttonc:31368503
retrydisabled:31368125

[vs-code-engineering]

Thanks for creating this issue! It looks like you may be using an old version of VS Code, the latest stable release is 1.103.1. Please try upgrading to the latest version and checking whether this issue remains.

Happy Coding!

[verdverm]

please keep humans in the loop

[Tyriar]

I've actually heard the opposite from a lot of people. The rationale here is that when a chat session becomes inactive, any terminals driven by the chat session are disposed of (except tasks I think). This will be even more important when the terminals are moved inline in #257468.

Are you having issues here because you're running other commands in the Copilot owned terminals? You could look into setting up tasks if you want them long running, you can also get them to report problems by doing that.

[verdverm]

This should be configurable, I do not want my terminal in the chat session sidebar

Instead of making one choice for everyone, let everyone make their own choices

I personally want to tell it which terminal to work with, not have it create an ephemeral one

Tasks is way more overhead for one-time, long running commands the ai puts together

[Tyriar]

@verdverm I've heard this from a few people and plan on making it an option, the default will change though.

I personally want to tell it which terminal to work with, not have it create an ephemeral one

That's a lot harder to do since messing with an existing terminal could potentially cause data loss, it could have a special environment setup (which could be a good thing). If you have ideas on how the user could opt-in to this and what the behavior would be exactly could be let us know. The agent needs to be able to work with an arbitrary number of terminals and just grabbed the open ones seems like it would just cause problems to me.

[verdverm]

@Tyriar I would imagine adding terminals could work like adding files to the context or perhaps more like tools / MCP

[Tyriar]

This doesn't happen anymore with recent changes (try insiders)

/duplicate