Consider using OSC 9;9 to inform Windows Terminal about CWD

Description of the new feature/enhancement

About a month ago I've filed #7668 , in the seek of a solution for #3158 . It raised a lot of discussion and I can totally understand why #7668 is acceptable to some people but unpalatable to others.

Recently with #8055 being accepted as a solution, I thought why not accept more sequences from ConEmu, which is a fantastic product I've personally used for a long time. So here I purpose we implement another OSC 9 custom sequence from ConEmu:

Sequence	Descriptoin
ESC ] 9 ; 9 ; “cwd” ST	Inform ConEmu about shell current working directory.

The source can be found in the ConEmu doc.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

PR: #8330

Shell configurations:

Maksim Moisiuk (@Maximus5)

CC Maksim Moisiuk (@Maximus5) for any suggestions on the remote connections.

I owe you a longer writeup on both this and OSC 7, and now that I'm back from leave, I don't really have any excuses 😝 I'll try to write something up later today. Thanks for your patience!

Mike Griese (@zadjii-msft)

Mike Griese (@zadjii-msft) It's absolutely OK. Take you time, man.

I've been experimenting with ConEmu and OSC 9;9 sequences. From what I can tell, the result of a OSC 9;9 is an option in the "Startup directory" when creating a new console:

So yeah, I guess we could use it for #3158 without breaking the original meaning of the this sequence.

(copypasta from my comment in #7668)

This one doesn't seem that bad. Since it's a windows-first sequence, it doesn't need to know anything else about who's emitting the path. We can always assume it has been emitted as a Windows path. On the surface, this seems to work great, save for one scenario - ssh. This sequence doesn't accept any sort of hostname, it only takes the path. So if you were ssh'd into another machine, and that one emitted a OSC9;9, then there's no way of determining that sequence wasn't intended for the current machine.

I think I'm okay with us implementing this as-is for the time being though. It's not a perfect sequence, but it's good enough, and doesn't come with the compat baggage that OSC7 does. It can certainly be supported with the caveat "This won't work in an ssh session, or in any scenario where it's emitted by a remote connection. It will always be treated as a path on the local machine".

As far as I can see, ConEmu will not enforce users to use CWD to open new tabs. Instead it just adds an option in the dropdown.

That's almost true. User may configure task to use %CD% as task startup directory. I didn't make it default behavior, but think to do from time to time.

and \w will be generating something like /home/myInWSLUser

ConEmu can (at least should) do automatic translation of Unix path to Windows path to maintain PWD. But with /home folders it's problematic of course.
At some point it was not working, but now as I can see, starting wsl in the folders like \\wsl$\Ubuntu-18.04\home\maximus\myInWslUser and C:\SRC works properly.
So I tend to change \w into wslpath -m "\w" in docs for wsl.

Quick note on wslpath -m, it's possible that there's no -m, and it needs to be -w. I know cygpath -m works for MSYS/Cygwin, but I don't recall if wslpath supports it.

It probably should be wslpath -w and cygpath -w for OSC 9;9 anyway, since the -m is "Windows path but with /", i.e. useful for appending to file://localhost/ to buld an OSC 7-valid URL.

Implement ConEmu's OSC 9;9 to set the CWD (#8330)

Implement ConEmu's OSC 9;9 to set the CWD (microsoft#8330)

Has anyone managed to make it work for cmd? I was using pwsh with osc9;9 string, but pwsh was too slow for normal use and am thinking of using cmd for interactive use. But I cannot set it up to open the new tab/split in current directory. Help.

https://gist.github.com/LuanVSO/09ba0239fe7c1a959a9b07c7156c5e13 from #3158 (comment) might work. (I haven't tried it)

Yes, it works. The one I got before used OSC7 instead of 9;9.

Yeah, OSC 7 isn't implemented in Windows Terminal, due to semantic conflicts in the specifications when applied to Windows.

EDIT:

Found a solution:
https://gist.github.com/LuanVSO/5e914af7f3f038f247b6729fc43b9c7c

I'm using Git Bash as default terminal in Window Terminal.
What is equivalent gist to put in .bashrc so that it remembers the last folder.

Already tried unsuccessful:

__wt_osc9_9 () {
    _win_path=$(pwd)
    printf "\033]9;9;%s\033\\" "$_win_path"
}

[ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ] && [ -n "$WT_SESSION" ] && PROMPT_COMMAND="__wt_osc9_9"

true

when terminal reopens it shows that error:

[error -2147024629 (-0x7ff8fef5) when launching `%USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/Programs/Git/bin/bash.exe -l -i']
Could not access starting directory "/c/WINDOWS/system32"

Joel (@joel-daros)

I know it's been a few years - but thanks Joel (@joel-daros)! I added that snippet to my .bashrc and it works great 😄

EDIT:

Found a solution:
https://gist.github.com/LuanVSO/5e914af7f3f038f247b6729fc43b9c7c

#8166 (comment)

Yeah, OSC 7 isn't implemented in Windows Terminal, due to semantic conflicts in the specifications when applied to Windows.

Is there some sort of document/discussion that says what these conflicts are? I am curious.

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Consider using OSC 9;9 to inform Windows Terminal about CWD #8166

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Consider using OSC 9;9 to inform Windows Terminal about CWD #8166

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skyline75489 commented on Nov 5, 2020

zadjii-msft commented on Nov 5, 2020

skyline75489 commented on Nov 6, 2020

zadjii-msft commented on Nov 9, 2020

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