Environment activation is not working reliably with "Command Prompt"

[bersbersbers]

I think this picture says it all:

Open a terminal, start typing, terminal auto activation interferes.

My settings (clean profile):

{
    "terminal.integrated.defaultProfile.windows": "Command Prompt",
    "python.useEnvironmentsExtension": true,
}

What is so frustrating about this issue is that this has been working fine for a long time (I opted into the pythonTerminalEnvVarActivation experiment) until about a year ago. Then the experiment was discontinued, the functionality was moved to a different extension, but - sorry to say it so bluntly - from a user POV, nothing has improved since then.

[karthiknadig]

@bersbersbers Please try setting python-envs.terminal.autoActivationType to shellStartup. That is the equivalent of the experiment you are talking about.

Notes on this:
For most cases this works with Shell Integration feature in VS Code. If SI is off or a terminal does not support SI then we update shell startup script to activate environments only when opened in VS Code. In case, shell does not support dynamic evals like nu it will fall back to command activation.

[bersbersbers]

Please try setting python-envs.terminal.autoActivationType to shellStartup

Thanks, I tried that before (should have mentioned that).

In a clean profile, this does not do anything:

{
    "terminal.integrated.defaultProfile.windows": "Command Prompt",
    "python.useEnvironmentsExtension": true,
    "python-envs.terminal.autoActivationType": "shellStartup",
}

For most cases this works with Shell Integration feature in VS Code

Well, I do see this:

So I thought enabling it manually might help, but shell integration does not list cmd as a supported shell:

If SI is off or a terminal does not support SI ...

I think this is the case for cmd, see previous comment.

... then we update shell startup script to activate environments only when opened in VS Code.

What does this mean exactly - when what is opened in VS Code? The shell? (That is not working.) The shell start script? (How do I open that?) The environment? (Does that mean I need to activate the environment once for the shell startup script to be modified?)

Either way: my observation is that in my case, environments are never automatically activated. Not on closing/re-opening the terminal, not on "Reload Window", not on closing/restarting VS Code. Config:

{
    "terminal.integrated.defaultProfile.windows": "Command Prompt",
    "python.useEnvironmentsExtension": true,
    "python-envs.terminal.autoActivationType": "shellStartup",
    "terminal.integrated.shellIntegration.enabled": true,
}

In case, shell does not support dynamic evals like nu it will fall back to command activation.

I don#t know what nu is, but cmd does not fall back to command activation for me (and even if it did, that would be a clear step back from what worked a year ago).

[karthiknadig]

This looks like a regression, really what should have happened here is you get a notification that says CMD startup will be updated. Following that, you get the same behavior as before where commands are not sent to the terminal but it just activates.

Cc @anthonykim1 looks like the fix for WSL detection broke CMD.

[anthonykim1]

@bersbersbers Thanks for the issue. I'll look into this and post more updates
I was able to repro this on windows cmd