Feature request: wt.exe should display shortcut icon in taskbar

[brucejo75]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

With a shortcut I can assign a wt.exe configuration per shortcut. But when the shortcut is run the wt.exe icon is shown not the shortcut icon.

This makes it hard to choose configurations short of opening each wt.exe window.

cmd.exe is an example of doing this well, it displays the icon of the shortcut when it is run. And each shortcut gets their own icon set in the taskbar for all windows started with that shortcut.

This would make it easy to set up specialized configs of wt.exe and be able to navigate between them easily.

This is similar to:

• Display current tab's icon as a badge on the taskbar icon #1871, but is not required to be dynamic.
• Suggestion: ability for terminals to set their tab icon #1868, but is not about changing any escape sequences

cmd.exe example

cmd.exe essentially has this feature. This should be able to be replicated by the Windows Terminal?

Create a shortcut1, target: C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe
Add it's own icon. (Icon1)

Create a shortcut2 target: C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe
Add it's own icon. (Icon2)

1. Start shortcut1, Icon1 displays in the taskbar.
2. Start shortcut2, Icon2 displays in the taskbar even though it is just a 2nd instance of cmd.exe.

Here is a screenshot:

What you are looking at:
2 separate cmd.exe sessions on the left & 2 different bash.exe sessions on the right. Each with their own taskbar icon. Very easy to choose the right session from the taskbar.

[zadjii-msft]

I'm mildly worried that this is a platform bug. I'd bet that shortcuts to app execution aliases always use the app's icon, and not the shortcut's. We could pretty easily test this by adding a shortcut to ubuntu.exe (or another distro's launcher) and changing that icon.

[brucejo75]

Works as described above with bash.exe & powershell.exe.

Looking at task manager, cmd.exe shortcuts launches a console host / cmd.exe pair in an independent process.

wt.exe looks like it spawns children for each launch?

FYI: I just tried changing the icon on another app (robomongo.exe) and it displays different behavior than the cmd shell apps. It will use the new shortcut icon but any later invocations with other shortcuts will keep the icon of the original invocation shortcut.

[brucejo75]

Also I know this feature is used extensively by Microsoft and the industry. It is a way to have an icon for a shell script invocation.

[zadjii-msft]

I mean, this is a bug in the sense that setting an icon for wt.exe doesn't apply to WT windows in the same way it does for conhost windows.

My theory is really specific to app execution aliases - the platform does all sorts of weird things for "centennial" (packaged Win32 applications), and this might even be something they're tracking internally.

[brucejo75]

ah, got it... I misunderstood. I will edit my comments...

[DHowett-MSFT]

Also, conhost has a heck lot of code written to make this work. The path to the lnk that spawned it is passed in STARTUPINFO, and conhost goes and cracks the link and does a resource load on the link's icon specifier.

It's doable, it's just a lot of annoying gross Win32 work.