How can I determine if my PowerShell script is running in Windows terminal?

[kasini3000]

How can I determine if my PowerShell script is running in Windows terminal?

I wrote a script, a.ps1, which contains some special unicode characters.
I want to check whether my script is running in the powershell executed by windows terminal. How can I detect the windows terminal host?

[marvhen]

This is working for me:

#Is-WindowsTerminal.ps1

function IsWindowsTerminal ($childProcess) {
    if (!$childProcess) {
        return $false
    } elseif ($childProcess.ProcessName -eq 'WindowsTerminal') {
        return $true
    } else {
        return IsWindowsTerminal -childProcess $childProcess.Parent
    }
}

return IsWindowsTerminal -childProcess (Get-Process -Id $PID)

[kasini3000]

Great,3q alot！

[oising]

@kasini3000 @marvhen I think it's considerably easier to check for the existence of the WT_SESSION environment variable.

function Test-WindowsTerminal { test-path env:WT_SESSION }

# or

if ($env:WT_SESSION) { 
    # yes, windows terminal
} else {
    # nope
}

[marvhen]

Indeed...much easier. I was not aware of that variable, but now see it is documented here.

[TitoAldarondo]

So I too initially headed down the route of checking $Env:WT_SESSION, but quickly realized that this wouldn't work when SSHing to other hosts. Instead, I decided to simply check for Unicode support in the current session:

function Test-IsEmojiFriendly {
  if ("$OutputEncoding".EndsWith('UTF8Encoding')) {
    return $true
  }
  return $false
}

There are probably other terminal-specific considerations here, but hopefully this helps.

[DHowett]

That's just going to tell you if PowerShell thinks it can send UTF-8 data somewhere; it will not tell you anything about the capabilities of the terminal it's talking to.

[gerardog]

FYI. I just rewrote IsWindowsTerminal but with support for WT as default terminal app, in this comment.

[gerardog]

function IsWTrun {'WindowsTerminal' -in (Get-Process).Name}

That returns true if any instance of WindowsTerminal is running. PowerShell could be running on an old Console Host and still return true if a WT is open.

[mrkey7]

function IsWTrun {'WindowsTerminal' -in (Get-Process).Name}

That returns true if any instance of WindowsTerminal is running. PowerShell could be running on an old Console Host and still return true if a WT is open.

Thanks. Do you have a 100% valid method? Looking for $Env:WT_SESSION not valid too