Feature Request: Task Bar jumplist should show items from profile

[RobCannon]

The Task Bar context menu

should show the items from the configured profiles that populate the new shell menu

[HBelusca]

"DOS but not DOS" .... 🤔

[RobCannon]

I just grabbed that screen shot from the blog post by @shanselman. His icons look better than mine!

[fcharlie]

@RobCannon The icon on the menu needs to be 32x32.
The icon for this console happens to be 32x32 bit 👇
https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal/blob/master/src/host/exe/console.ico

https://iconverticons.com/online/ Convert to 32x32 icon/png

This is the small icon I made: icons.zip

[zadjii-msft]

This is a really good idea

[Jarvis73]

@fcharlie How can I add icons to the shell list just like that in your picture?

[fcharlie]

@Jarvis73 Modify profile.json,
Look: A new Console for Windows - It's the open source Windows Terminal
https://gist.github.com/shanselman/221ef38d035fcf2836d664009f144eac

[Jarvis73]

@fcharlie Perfect!

[mdtauk]

This context menu is called the Jumplist, for anyone planning to add this functionality in a PR

[topkecleon]

The jump list should also feature an option to launch Terminal as an administrator.

There has been discussion in other issues (#146, #632) as to why individual tabs can't be administrative, but a lumplist option to launch the whole program as administrator, like PowerShell or cmd, would be great.

[berwyn]

If you guys wouldn't mind, I'd love to take a stab at this!

[miniksa]

@berwyn, presuming that the scope of what you're attempting to take on is:

• Determine how to register a jump list inside the TerminalApp project
• Only listing the items in the jump list that would already otherwise be accessible from the + dropdown menu

Then I am OK with you proceeding on this and I will assign you. If things start to get outside the proposal or off the rails, please consult with us here before going further.

Disclaimer: You're going to be among the first people we assign to do a feature that aren't on our direct team. It might be rough and neither we nor you know exactly what to expect. Bear with us. We're learning how to be open as much as you're learning how to work in our code. A few notes to take with you as you go:

1. Try to match the style of where you're working. Try Modern C++ practices. Try to use WIL/GSL referencing other example usages. Try to add TAEF tests when/if you can (we know the Terminal project is rough here right now).
2. Be ready for a back-and-forth on PR or for us to generate a bunch of "new rules" or "regulations" as an outcome of this experience.
3. We're as excited as you are to have this be open, but please only expect our promptish responses M-F 8am-5pm Pacific Daylight Time. Be patient otherwise, we're coming back to you. We just like our families and friends and sleep and we're honestly overwhelmed with the amount of traffic we have received in the last 3 days and are struggling to keep up.

Fair?

[berwyn]

I am 100% onboard with being a guinea pig for external contributions! And, indeed, I was planning to only introduce the profile items in the flyout to the jumplist.

[shanselman]

@HBelusca I called it that (in my own profile) because cmd.exe isn't DOS, but it is.

[zadjii-msft]

@berwyn to add:

I'd probably do the jumplist in the WindowsTerminal project - we're trying to keep the UWP-like code in TerminalApp and the Win32-like code in WindowsTerminal. See src/cascadia/WindowsTerminal/AppHost.cpp for a place to start. You should be able to add methods to App to be able to query something like the profiles. Here be dragons though, the Profiles are not a C++/WinRT type, so they probably won't be exposable directly through the .idl. I can provide guidance here if you need help

[berwyn]

@zadjii-msft I may open a draft PR today for this, but I actually met with great success creating the jumplist and its entries, introducing a method IAsyncAction App::_CreateJumplist() that's invoked immediately following App::_CreateNewTabFlyout(). Where I'm struggling is on responding to the actual click events on the jumplist items.

On a straight UWP, it seems like the Windows::UI::Xaml::StartScreen helpers create links that are intended to be handled by the App::OnLaunched(LaunchedEventArgs const&). I dropped in an appropriate function on App before it occurred to me that the desktop bridge may or may not actually connect those events. As of right now, the breakpoints I've set there were never hit and I'm not sure if that's just my inexperience debugging C++ and/or WinRT, or if there's some linkage issue due to the desktop bridge.

I've also never touched UWP with C++, so it's a learning process in that regard, do I need to declare lifecycle functions in the idl? Because that could also be the problem here (and that only just ocurred to me as I'm tying this).

[zadjii-msft]

Oh yikes, that might be a harder problem that we thought then.

As you've discovered, we're not really a real UWP, we're a Win32 application. Our App.cpp/h/idl/xaml is not a real UWP "App" in this sense (it's actually just a trick to get XAML to work right for XAML Islands applications. I'm fairly certain (@DHowett-MSFT call me out if I'm wrong) even if you put Onlaunched in the idl, it wouldn't be called, because the application is getting activated as a traditional Win32 application.

So, how could we still make this work?

I don't really know how jumplists work, but if they let you specify commandline args, then maybe you could pass a --profile <guid> to wt.exe, and then parse the commandline in WindowsTerminal/main.cpp. Then, when creating the App, you'd pass the initial profile to the constructor. That's one option. Commandline args are something we want to add eventually, so you'd be the one to put some of the basics in place.

@miniksa any other ideas? I feel like there's gotta be an easier solution out there somewhere.

[berwyn]

I had that thought was well, and it's the direction I started sniffing in last night but didn't get much of a chance to dig into it. Barring any other ideas that crop up, is there a good reference I could look at for handling commandline args in a Microsoft-approved manner? Maybe something in ConHost that could (I assume ConsoleArguments) that could be brushed up and pulled into the shared bits?

[zadjii-msft]

ConsoleArguments is where I'd start.

IIRC there was talk of adding getopt to the windows sdk (or CRT I don't remember) at some point, but idk if that ever actually happened or not.

[miniksa]

For the arguments part, I agree. Go ahead and abstract/derive/baseclass/reuse ConsoleArguments into a shared component.

Probably into the Types one given its our grab bag of useful utilities shared across half-past everything.

Also, I'm doing some research into how jump lists work now to try to give you better advice. By what mechanism did you register the jump list? Is there some UWP/WinRT API to do it?

[berwyn]

I leveraged the WinRT helpers to create the items, since that's on the list of APIs exposed to desktop bridge apps. I haven't had a chance to play with passing a full executable with args in for the arguments parameter, but it does seem to accept any arbitrary parameter.

I'll pop open a draft PR once I get home and have my hands on the code, should make it easier to discuss/iterate on the code.

[miniksa]

OK, reading that documentation, I think that figuring out how to catch the arguments coming in on the initial wmain and probably figuring out how to single-instance or communicate with the existing running process are going to be the challenges here.

I was hoping Jump List registration also included an eventing callback that would be fired in the same process it was registered from, but that seems to be not true. It just seems to be a registration that tells the shell to CreateProcess/ShellExecute something and maybe with arguments.

[berwyn]

Alright, I've opened a draft (#689) to track progress on this. So far, it's just my first attempt at getting the items into the jumplist. I'll probably take some time this weekend to have a stab at parsing the commandline and launching tabs

[gamagan]

I haven't seen it mentioned specifically in this thread; please keep in mind this feature, of pinning script-files to jump list:
#5261

[ghost]

I consider this a very necessary feature. Many times I don't want to launch the default when I launch terminal so it just wastes time to have to launch it to open a tab I don't need and then launch another tab.

ConEmu has jumplist functionality and I use it constantly.

[clarkezone]

Is any progress being made on this? If no maybe help is needed?

[zadjii-msft]

Not yet. I believe it's next up on @leonMSFT's todo list - hence why it's in the 1.4 milestone.

[clarkezone]

If you need help happy to take a stab.

[ghost]

🎉This issue was addressed in #7515, which has now been successfully released as Windows Terminal Preview v1.4.2652.0.:tada:

Handy links:

• Release Notes
• Store Download