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Opening Terminal inside Windows Explorer as a pane (or vice-versa) #5591
Description
Description of the new feature/enhancement
All the CMD terminals can be initiate from windows explorer which creates two windows to work with. In some development environments such as VSCode etc, you can combine the terminal to your IDE which is very helpful.
It would be very helpful if we can open the terminal in Windows Explorer so we can have access visually to the files and through the terminal. Also, they can be synced when we change the folder to the other location.
Reacted by Amin Ya, 1337cookie, キャラ, Seonglae Cho, Alan Ninan Thomas, Tim Siggins, AraHaan, Haodong Duan, Tomás Rinaldi, Amrit and 23 more
Activity
zadjii-msft commentedon Apr 27, 2020
So this is a neat idea, though something that would be largely really hard to implement.
Say we were able to put a Terminal instance within
explorer.exe. When the user navigates files in explorer, I'm not sure there's any good way for something likeexplorerto be able to change the working directory ofcmdorpowershell. Further, what would happen if there was something that wasn't a shell running in the Terminal instance? What if you were running thepythonREPL? What if you were running some sort of webserver, or msbuild? What if you ranssh user@some-other-serverin the Terminal? What would changing the directory inexplorer.exedo then?I think largely it would be really hard for changing the directory in explorer to have an effect on the Terminal that would be embedded in it. It would probably be at best capable of starting in the current directory that explorer was in.
It's also hard for the Terminal to report which directory it is in, and when the directory changes, for much of the same reason. I'd refer to #3158 for more details on this topic.
That being said, I think it would be a cool extension once #3158 landed for the Terminal to be able to display the CWD contents. For that reason alone, I'm linking this to #4000
aminya commentedon Jul 24, 2020
I wish there was a collapsable pane on the sides of the terminal that showed an explorer, and I could navigate through the files and folders using it and tell the terminal to
cd here, etc.just1a-person commentedon Dec 11, 2020
Idea: Preview Pane Handler?
josalhor commentedon Dec 11, 2020
Hello, I come from microsoft/PowerToys#2555 .
I will try to provide a summary of that issue:
Dolphin handles this feature with the following behaviour:
You can see an example of what that looks like here. This allows developers to quickly see which files they have available at the current folder much faster than if they were to manually parse that information from a console. It also helps while exploring an unknown directory structure or with file visualization (like with images or markdown). Ideally it would be integrated with WSL and would allow for better interaction with the Linux Subsystem.
[-]Opening the windows terminal inside Windows Explorer rather than from windows Explorer[/-][+]Opening Terminal inside Windows Explorer as a pane (or vice-versa)[/+]zadjii-msft commentedon Nov 8, 2022
idle thought: I wonder if it'd be possible to have a (hypothetical) Terminal extension "drive" an explorer window. Like, have it pop up a little window picker, and then any time the pane's CWD gets set via shell integration, the extension goes and manually changes that explorer window's path.
zadjii-msft commentedon Mar 9, 2023
A crazy idea from Teams
alensiljak commentedon Oct 19, 2023
I would appreciate with a "start small" approach and have an option of adding a Terminal tab in Windows Explorer. And, when I say tab, I mean just another tab - which seems to be a new feature in Explorer anyway.
There are tabs also in the terminal window and it can run various shells.
So, why not simply provide the possibility to open the current folder as a new tab in Windows Explorer? No sync to anything. Just another tab, hosting a shell (default Terminal?), starting from the location where we chose an action to open it.
All the other details can be worked-out (if needed!) at a later stage.
Edit: I think this is actually already happening. Dragging a tab from the Terminal window to the Explorer window does indeed make a space for the new tab. However, the drop operation is not handled yet. But it seems to be moving in that direction.
zadjii-msft commentedon Oct 19, 2023
To be very clear: this is not happening any time soon. The only reason that happens is that the two different
TabViews in Terminal and Explorer both by default act like they can accept drag/drops from any other tabbed application, when they really can't. Even dragging a terminal tab over VsCode will change the feedback to "Move↗", as if vscode could accept the drag (it can't). This is one of the (many) bugs we've got to sort out on the WinUI side.youngvernon commentedon Dec 11, 2023
Something similar to this would be awesome
klaribot commentedon Mar 11, 2024
This would be an incredibly useful addition to the Explorer if it had a terminal pane just like KDE's
dolphinfile browser, where changing folders/directories within Explorer would keep the current working directory of the attached terminal in sync.And it would be even more incredible of a feature if what Mike Griese (@zadjii-msft) commented on was actually possible.
I know they mean that this is a bug, not a feature, and needs to be addressed, but it would be really cool if it were addressed in a way to make that bug work as the accidental feature instead of patching it out, y'know? One can dream, I suppose.