microsoft / microsoft/vscode-python-environments

Please make `python-envs.terminal.autoActivationType` syncable to all remotes

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#1,640 2 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@edvilme is already working on this.

Since Aug 5, 2026.

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Description

The canonical fix for [VSCode killing any running process to activate a Python environment after opening a terminal](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python-environments/issues/1288) is to [set `autoActivationType` to a non-default value](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python-environments/issues/1288#issuecomment-3985435101).

The problem is that, at least on my machine, this is per-remote. Below screenshots are on an AWS EC2 instance:

Image

Image

This means that every time I start an instance or a new dev container, the first command I run in every terminal is killed until I got change that setting again.

Given that killing running processes indiscriminately is disruptive, I think it would be good to make it possible for a user to change this behavior for good. Otherwise, the only option is `"python.terminal.activateEnvironment": false`, which isn't ideal either.

Maybe there could be a `defaultAutoActivationType` setting that syncs, so the user can choose the syncing version or the other at will? Alternatively, setting the default to `shellStartup` might be less surprising and less likely to cause problems.

A good reason to care about this is that this can cost the user money. In my case, it killed an OpenCode session that had been running for hours, which I discovered too late, leading to a cache miss on the whole conversation when I started it again.

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