microsoft / microsoft/terminal

Consider adding a WT_PROFILE env var pointing to settings file

Open
#4,566 21 comments 14 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Area-Settings Help Wanted Issue-Feature Product-Terminal
Dominant language
C++
Stars
105k
Forks
9.6k
Avg merge
3d 17h
Merged PRs (30d)
29

Description

If the settings UI is not planned until after 1.0, then I strongly recommend adding an environment variable with the path to the json settings file, so it can be edited with the editor of choice (vi, notepad, nano, emacs, whatever) from within the shell of choice without burning brain calories trying to find it buried in AppData. Also: Relying on the GUI menu is, well, unreliable, due to there being no guarantee of a valid file association for json files.

We've already got WT_SESSION env var -- something like WT_PROFILE would be useful.

Then from within cmd or powershell, I can easily edit settings with my preferred editor, or interactively using $settings = gc $env:WT_PROFILE | convertto-json and flipping settings on the object model directly before saving it back out.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No source file or test is named. Start by tracing how WT_SESSION is set and how the JSON settings path is resolved; then determine where a WT_PROFILE value would be exposed. Done means the environment variable reliably points to the settings file for shell-based editing, with coverage for the supported terminal startup paths.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
cli, operating-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.