Minimized terminal without explorer is not interactable

[mybearworld]

Windows Terminal version

1.18.3181.0

Windows build number

10.0.22631.3085

Other Software

No response

Steps to reproduce

1. Open WT
2. Kill explorer.exe (taskkill -f -im explorer.exe)
3. Minimize the window
4. Try interacting with the maximize, restore and close buttons

Expected Behavior

The buttons work. The window is draggable, as with other apps.

Actual Behavior

The buttons don't work. The window isn't draggable.
The window is restorable by Alt+Tab or enabling quake mode, for instance, though, as expected.

[zadjii-msft]

Okay so this might be a dumb question - how are you interacting with a minimized window, if explorer is dead (and presumably, there's no taskbar)/?

[mybearworld]

When a window is minimized without explorer active, it turns into this:

[zadjii-msft]

It does? I've never seen that before and I can't repro that now. That does look like the "iconified" state of the HWND, but typically iconified HWNDs are placed off at (-3200, -3200) IIRC.

Do you know if that's actually a Terminal HWND - for like, windowsterminal.exe? I have a sneaking suspicion that the hwnd there is actually OpenConsole.exe (though, I guess that would have the old conhost icon, not the Terminal one...).

Is there anything else running on your PC that might be messing with HWNDs? PowerToys? AHK?

[mybearworld]

Both PowerToys and AutoHotKey are running, but the same thing happens even after killing those two.

Do you know if that's actually a Terminal HWND - for like, windowsterminal.exe? I have a sneaking suspicion that the hwnd there is actually OpenConsole.exe (though, I guess that would have the old conhost icon, not the Terminal one...).

I'm not sure how I can check that. That pill disappears when alt+tabbing back to WT or clicking on the icon when restarting explorer - so they are related.

[zadjii-msft]

Okay maybe we need to take a step back here - why are you killing explorer? Is there like, a reason you're trying to run without it? I'm pretty confident that running with explorer killed is largely an unsupported scenario, so like... Here be dragons 🐉/?

[mybearworld]

If explorer is unable to start for whatever reason, using the console to restart explorer/run some checks/whatever is probably not an unlikely scenario.

[tusharsnx]

Right click to the rescue!

no-explorer-wt-maximize.mp4

For why the buttons don't work... maybe there's a WinUI overlay that we are drawing on top of system caption buttons which is stealing all the mouse events 🤔 Since right click gets you the same functionality, I don't think we need any special arrangement for a no-explorer case.

[carlos-zamora]

Does this repro with console host?

[mybearworld]

Does this repro with console host?

No, it works as expected with conhost.