Restore terminal sessions between restarts

[Tyriar]

Forking off from #20013, this issue is about restoring the terminal process shell, args, env and layout (dropdown/splits).

[fabiospampinato]

I'm posting my thoughts about this, since I've tackled this issue with my Terminals extension.

this issue is about restoring the terminal process shell, args, env and layout

Restoring shell, args and env: I might be wrong on this but I think one can't even set these variables on a per-terminal basis when creating terminals manually, so we would be either restoring terminals with default shell, args and env (nothing to restore basically), or terminals created by extensions, which are going to get recreated by those extensions anyway (there's no way of getting a list of opened terminals, so those extensions can't re-use restored terminals even if they wanted to).

Restoring layout: this is certainly useful, but I personally don't like if throwaway/temporary terminals get restored. And there's no way of knowing which terminal is important and which isn't without providing some kind of configuration.

it would be good to have some basic restoring if it won't get in the way, we certainly wouldn't want to add the complexity that this extension allows.

IMHO the real value comes from restoring commands as well as the layout, and possibly outputs too. Given the relatively low value of a restored layout without commands/output and the problem with duplicated terminals that get recreated by extensions I think it's not worth implementing this into the core.

I need to do some thinking about it, how it interacts with tasks and debug

I personally don't use tasks at all, and I'm not sure how terminals have anything to do with debug, what do you mean exactly?

While we're at it, these are a few API suggestions that would allow me to provide a more powerful/complete extension:

• Output restoration: It would be cool if we could restore the output of the terminals, for doing so I think a couple of APIs for reading and replacing a terminal's content are necessary.
• Splits restoration: As mentioned here an API for splitting terminals would be necessary in order to add this functionality.
• Listing all the terminals: Providing an array of all the opened terminals could be useful.

[Tyriar]

I personally don't use tasks at all, and I'm not sure how terminals have anything to do with debug, what do you mean exactly?

You can have debuggers run their processes inside the terminal, I think the main benefit here is you get to see the stdout of the process.

Output restoration

While possible to do, I'm not convinced this would be useful if the process needs to be recreated?

Splits restoration

I think we need this #45407

Listing all the terminals

#13267

[fabiospampinato]

I'm not convinced this would be useful if the process needs to be recreated?

I think it depends on the output, for my use cases this wouldn't be particularly valuable either, but maybe it would be useful for all those times one finds himself scrolling back the terminal.

[M-Zuber]

Other than my 👍 , the only thing I would want to ask for is to extend this from just restarts into having configurations associated with workspaces/folders

Which of course, @fabiospampinato's extension does wonderfully, but if we end up with an "official" api for this, it could enable core and/or other extensions to hook into the functionality.