CLI: Support tilde (~) shortcut to user profile in -d argument

[Ariane-B]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

Currently, if I want to open a Terminal tab that starts in a specific folder in my user profile, I have to write -d C:\Users\MyUser\somefolder. I wish I could use the shortcut ~ to say "that's my user folder".

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

For example, I could use the command wt -d ~/somefolder, which would be equivalent to wt -d C:\Users\MyUser\somefolder.

[DHowett]

Hey, this is a good idea.

[kaifee-haque]

Looks like we can already open a Terminal tab that starts in C:\Users\MyUser\somefolder by using the command wt -d somefolder.

[Ariane-B]

That is cool, but it would be nice if it were clearer in the docs, because I was convinced the root for the -d parameter was "My PC" or "C:".

[DHowett]

As with all Windows applications, the root of any relative directory parameter is the current working directory.

This means that if you run wt -d x from C:\a it will start a profile in C:\a\x.

We opted not to document behavior that is either incidental or not a deviation from other applications :)

[Ariane-B]

Oh, that's what you meant! I thought you meant that the -d argument was always based on the current user's directory. If the base is the current command line directory, then my suggestion stands.

What you describe makes perfect sense. But in the context of a startup shortcut, for example, the directory it runs from is not immediately obvious. Add in general, I don't think it's entirely safe to assume everyone will always be running the shell command line from their home folder.

Also, there might be cases where a single shell file will be run by several users, who'd want the starting directory to be in -their- user folder.

Finally, some people like to specify things when they're insecure about what the automatic behaviour would be. Simply mentioning the thing is sometimes simpler than researching the default behaviour, after all.

For all these reasons, I think I'll stand behind my suggestion.

[KnapSac]

Can I pick this up?

[zadjii-msft]

I'm a little worried about this request. Treating ~ as %USERPROFILE%seems like a good idea, but what if someone wants to use ~ as their WSL ~ directory, not their Windows one?

IMO I'd want that question answered before we ship this.

[KnapSac]

Maybe that should depend on the profile you're targeting? For instance, when opening a WSL profile we could treat ~ as their WSL ~ directory, and for other profiles we could treat it as %USERPROFILE%.

[zadjii-msft]

Ah but how do we know for certain if they"re targeting a WSL profile? The user could make other WSL profiles other than the dynamically generated ones. In that case, we wouldn't have the source data to tell use that the profile is a WSL profile. Maybe we need to add another wslDistro property that identifies which distro the profile is for. That might play into #592 (et al) as well.

/cc @DHowett since we've been having discussion about this in the past

[zadjii-msft]

We might have low key done this unintentionally.

#12437

If we find that we were unable to mangle ~ into the user's WSL commandline, then we will re-evaluate that startingDirectory as %USERPROFILE%, which is at least something sensible, if albeit not what they wanted.

I mean, it makes sense. ~ isn't a valid path for a Windows process, but it is for a WSL process. We've already got some magic to make this work for WSL processes. Now we've got different magic to make it work for anything other than wsl.exe. If we see a startingDirectory of ~, we're gonna treat it like %USERPROFILE% now.

This should be in Terminal v1.12.10393.0, Terminal Preview v1.13.10395.0