DISCUSSION: Is my app running in Terminal?

[vefatica]

I've been using

!((BOOL) SendMessage(GetConsoleWindow(), WM_GETICON, 0, 0))

Other ideas? Thanks. - Vince

[zadjii-msft]

Could you clarify? What exactly are you trying to do?

[DHowett]

Looks like somebody is trying to set the icon by literally telling the window manager to replace it. Hm.

[vefatica]

I'm trying to find out if my app is running in Windows Terminal. I don't care about the icon. If I'm in a console, that evaluates to FALSE; in Terminal to TRUE.

[DHowett]

If you have a reason to detect if you are running inside terminal, we should probably have the discussion as to why you want to detect that.

Any behavior you believe to be Terminal-specific is not, I promise you, and your application will do the wrong thing.

[vefatica]

Didn't you (a while back) give me a list of Win32 API console functions that wouldn't work as expected in Terminal. I suppose much behavior IS Terminal-specific and I don't want my app doing the wrong thing.

[zadjii-msft]

Ah, those functions you should avoid calling in general, not just "in the Windows Terminal". Those are functions that'll work less well in any ConPTY session. This includes the Windows Terminal, ssh sessions, and other terminal emulators as well, like VsCode, hyper, mintty, etc. In those other applications, you might not be able to detect that you're running in the Windows Terminal, but those APIs would still behave weirdly.

Very specifically, GetConsoleWindow is one of those APIs 😉