[1.22] Terminal stops functioning after closing last window with "compatibility.allowHeadless" enabled and "windowingBehavior" set to "useExisting"/"useAnyExisting"

[nickamante]

Windows Terminal version

1.22.10730.0

Windows build number

10.0.26100 (Windows 11)
10.0.19045 (Windows 10)

Other Software

No response

Steps to reproduce

• Enable Settings > Compatibility > Allow Windows Terminal to run in the background
• Close all existing Terminal windows
• Attempt to re-launch Terminal (directly via Start > Terminal or via Global Summon hotkey)
  • Terminal does not launch
• Attempt to launch Command Prompt, Windows Powershell, Powershell 7 (x64)
  • Terminal does not launch; after ~30 seconds the non-terminal version of the app launches.

Expected Behavior

Terminal remains running in the background and launching new Terminal windows continues to work.

Actual Behavior

• After closing the last window, WindowsTerminal.exe remains running in Task Manager.
• If Appearance > Always display an icon in the notification area is enabled, left-clicking the icon or right-click Focus Terminal has no effect. Under Windows > the last window to be closed remains listed.
• New terminal windows will not launch until the WindowsTerminal.exe process is killed in Task Manager.
• Turning off Allow Windows Terminal to run in the background causes the WindowsTerminal.exe process to exit after the last window is closed and allows re-launch

[carlos-zamora]

Hi @nickamante. I'm struggling to get a repro on this bug. I've been trying it out with the following parameters:

• a clean settings.json and state.json, except "compatibility.allowHeadless": true, added to settings.json
• WT Dev build of v1.22.10731.0 and WT Stable v1.22.10731.0

Could you share a copy of your settings.json and state.json please /? (Just in case) The state.json is stored right next to the settings.json.

Thanks in advance!

[nickamante]

Here you go - I've got the same issue on both my older Dell Windows 10 laptop and a brand new Windows 11 Lenovo. Aside from the out of the box software I've installed the following on the Lenovo machine (via winget): WSL/Ubuntu, Powershell 7, Gsudo, Git, TortoiseGit, Beyond Compare 5, OhMyPosh, Clink, GrepWin, Visual Studio Code, Firefox, Spotify. It's largely just dev/terminal focused apps at the point when I discovered the issue. I'd think it might be related to one of them, except Terminal fails to launch for all shells and yet the shells themselves have no issues once taking Terminal out of the picture.

settings.json
state.json

[carlos-zamora]

Thanks! Got a repro! Looks like the minimal repro is this:

"windowingBehavior": "useExisting",
"compatibility.allowHeadless": true,

Looks like this got fixed in #18623, as a part of the big windowing refactor which is available in v1.23.10732.0 (the current Preview channel) . We're looking to do a release in the coming weeks, which includes moving v1.23 to the Stable channel, so a fix should be out soon 😊

[carlos-zamora]

Actually, re-opening. It'll be good to have a hotfix for this on 1.22 since we have a lot of windowing changes in 1.23. Just to be safe.