Allow extensions to contribute terminal profiles

[davidanthoff]

The new terminal profiles are fantastic! It would be great if extensions could automatically add entries to the list of profiles. This would essentially be a similar feature to Windows Terminal fragments.

Here is a use-case: the Julia extension adds a command Julia: Start REPL, and that then starts a Julia REPL in a new terminal. In my mind, with the new terminal profile UI, that command should really just appear as another terminal profile in the UI, alongside all the other terminal profiles that show up in the terminal drop down. So essentially I would like to see the ability for our extension to add an entry in this list

that reads New Julia REPL, and then calls a function in our extension that executes all the necessary steps to start a new Julia REPL in a terminal window.

Ideally that would also help with a "restart" scenario. Right now, if a user starts a new Julia REPL, has that open and then restarts VS Code, VS code starts a new shell that wasn't open in the previous instance. With this feature idea here, I could imagine that VS code at shutdown "remembers" which terminal profile was used to create which terminal instance, and then at restart uses the correct terminal profile to recreate the same terminal that was open in the previous instance.

[vscodebot]

(Experimental duplicate detection)
Thanks for submitting this issue. Please also check if it is already covered by an existing one, like:

• Extra characters appended when pasting text of certain size into Julia REPL running in VSCode (#112831)

[Tyriar]

We've essentially had this available for the JS Debug terminal for several iterations, just never thought about stabilizing it. My thinking:

• I'll bring this up in the next API sync to see if we can move towards officially stabilize this
• We need to make sure users can remove them by setting the profile name to null in their settings
• Right now the API is terminal.types, it should be terminal.profiles
• Extensions should not include "Create" or "New" in the profile name, we should fix this in JS Debug this iteration

[davidanthoff]

Yes, that sounds perfect.

Just out of curiosity: Could we do the same thing that the JS Debug terminal does right now already and it would work? Or is this that just works with internal extensions?

[Tyriar]

Feedback from UX sync:

• types -> profiles 👍
• For the alt+enter/click and issue where it could be any arbitrary command that could be abused, we'll probably want to go the direction of adding an activation event and allowing an extension to simply provide TerminalOptions for the terminal and vscode core handles how it's actually created. This would also mean that alt+enter/click support isn't blocked by Add an API for specifying terminal location #45407