suggestion: option to reuse terminals

[chrisdias]

There is no API to let me see if a terminal is in use, so whenever a command is run we spin up a new terminal. This leads to a bunch of unused terminals to clean up.

Suggest to investigate an option that reuses the same terminal, commands are effectively queued up.

[wsmelton]

Might check docker-explorer as they reuse terminal sessions in that extension. It seems like they pick up what the terminal is named and simply reference that to find the right terminal to use...but I don't claim to know how extensions are written 😀

[PrashanthCorp]

Is this a dupe of #74 ?

[StephenWeatherford]

Consider a flag as to whether or not to show a new terminal. But it might depend on the command, e.g.:

Run Interactive
Run
Show Logs
Build

Might need more thinking.

[StephenWeatherford]

Or experimenting

[bwateratmsft]

Resolved by #1245

[ejizba]

@bwateratmsft are you sure you closed the right issue here? This issue covers several features as mentioned above in Stephen's comment including compose, run, push image, pull image, view logs, etc. Basically anything that uses this

[bwateratmsft]

Sorry, I was thinking about build which is resolved. But the rest would not be.

[bwateratmsft]

Alex's suggestion was to create a Task object dynamically, and then execute it. This would result in terminals being re-used (most of the time), but for things like run-interactive, where a task stays running, the Task would automatically open a new terminal. Which is awesome!

[bwateratmsft]

There are some major challenges to this approach with regard to shell quoting. Most of the commands work just fine, but attach is broken on PowerShell. The default command is docker exec -it abc123 /bin/sh -c "[ -e /bin/bash ] && /bin/bash || /bin/sh". In a terminal window this works fine, but when run as a ShellExecution, the command essentially becomes powershell -c 'docker exec -it abc123 /bin/sh -c "[ -e /bin/bash ] && /bin/bash || /bin/sh"', which does not work; the double-quotes are unescaped and the shell gets confused.

I think it's safe to change the default value for docker.attachShellCommand.linuxContainer as there are only ~12 users worldwide who appear to have a non-default command, compared to >19K with the default.

[bwateratmsft]

Blocked on #1980.

[bwateratmsft]

This has been fixed in Docker extension version 1.5.0.