microsoft / microsoft/terminal

Need a way to have per-machine profiles in settings

Open
#641 4 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

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

Description

Settings roam, which is really cool! However, my machines don't all have the same configuration. For instance, my main dev machine has tooling installed on the O: drive. My default profile runs the VS command prompt batch file. Well, I just dropped terminal on a second machine that doesn't have the same hardware config, so this default profile is totally busted there. Thankfully I'm launching with cmd /k o:\...foo.cmd, so I just get a slightly annoying error from CMD.

However, we'll need a way to have some way of differentiating config. As an idea, in other tools (e.g. emacs), it's not uncommon to key off of machine name to vary configuration.

=========

After a brief discussion in triage, we realize that there's going to need to be a thorough design of how we want per-machine settings to be done here.

The initial design of settings is "simple" in that all settings applied in an unfiltered fashion and there's only 1 file and we have no "settings UI yet".

There's advantages to no settings UI.
There's advantages to having only one settings file.
There's advantages to being able to layer multiple settings files.
And so on and so forth.

Therefore, it's a feature that someone needs to sit down and spec at a future date.

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 implementation file or test is named. Start by reviewing the current settings model described in the issue: one unfiltered settings file and no settings UI, then use the triage discussion to scope machine-specific or layered settings. Done means an agreed specification for how per-machine settings should work.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
cli, desktop, tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.