Terminal action buttons are hidden when terminal is not focused

[machadinhos]

Reproduction steps

1. start zed
2. open the terminal
3. click outside the terminal

Current vs. Expected behavior

Hi!

First of all this isn't a "bug" per say, it seems to be an internded behavior, but it's a very annoying behavior. Not critical.

Right now, if you open a terminal window and then start working on something else, you'll need to click inside the terminal before you can make any changes, open a new terminal, or perform other actions, because the action buttons are hidden whenever the terminal window isn't focused.

It would be much better if the buttons were always visible in the top left corner of the terminal window, removing the step of focusing the window first.

This also happens when multiple terminal windows are open side by side, only the focused terminal window shows the action buttons.

A good solution could also be only showing the buttons when either the terminal is focused or it's being hovered instead of always showing it.

Thank you for this amazing editor and for any help!

[miguelraz]

Thank you for filing this report. I understand some of this behavior is unintuitive, but I want to try and convince you that this is intended behavior for the following reasons:

If you click to open a file, the action buttons will be transferred to the top right. When you click back to the terminal, the context will bring them back.

You can see this with the dev: open key context view.

It's totally fine to disagree and say this should be a toggleable option to always have them present! But that ventures in the feature discussion land, and not a bug report per se.

I'll move this issue into a discussion so that it's filed in the right place.

[machadinhos]

Thanks for the response!

Yeah, as I mentioned, this behavior is intentional, but I would argue it's not the best UX. It can create situations where users can't find the action button, to split a view for example, because they're not currently focused on the window they want to split. Even when aware of how it works, it still adds an unnecessary extra click.

It would be great to make this configurable, with options to:

• Always show the buttons
• Show it only when the window is focused (the current behavior)
• Show it on window focus and/or window hover, if having the buttons always visible leads to unnecessary visual clutter (maybe too complex, just a thought)

[tsoj]

If you click to open a file, the action buttons will be transferred to the top right. When you click back to the terminal, the context will bring them back.

To be honest, I don't really understand the advantage this has over just showing the buttons always for both/all windows. Would it make the Zed code more complicated?

[sohang3112]

Yes this behavior is really annoying - eg. the terminal new tab + button should always be present. I can't see the point of auto hiding. At least some setting should definitely be there to toggle auto-hiding behavior.

[KyleRAnderson]

I agree that I would like these icons shown by default. It's annoying to have to first click somewhere in the terminal area to get it to show up.

[nicole-mcg]

Agreed, there should be options to show always, and show on hover. IMO show on hover should be the default. It's a good balance of usability with the goal to avoid UI clutter