microsoft / microsoft/terminal

Terminal should support Taskbar.AppId so that different Terminal groups can glom separately on the taskbar

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Area-UserInterface Help Wanted Issue-Task Product-Terminal
Dominant language
C++
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Forks
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Avg merge
3d 17h
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Description of the new feature/enhancement

The current Terminal implementation always ends up with the same Taskbar.AppId so all Terminal instances on the system will "glom" (aka combine) into a single entry on the taskbar. My ideal workflow is to have separate taskbar entries for my separate Git clones and to use this separation (and distinct icons) to help me keep them straight. Within a given glom it would still be useful and good to support multiple tabs within Terminal.

In the past I have done this by having different shortcut files to cmd.exe and the /k flag allows them to have different enough identities to glom separately. Terminal doesn't seem to be compatible with this approach so they all still combine together. It would be nice if they could be separated back out.

If it is easier to implement it would still be valuable if this glomming was based on which Terminal profile was launched (e.g. cmd vs. powershell).

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

The best documentation I could find on this old-style API is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2009/brownfield/windows-7-taskbar-apis. This concept has indeed existed since Win7 and as far as I know should continue to work essentially the same even on the latest versions of Win10.

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

Start by tracing where Terminal assigns Taskbar.AppId and review the linked Windows 7 taskbar API documentation. Define completion as allowing separate Terminal groups based on distinct launch identities or profiles while preserving multiple tabs within each group, then validate the behavior on the Windows taskbar.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
cli, desktop
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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