vscode: Some shells don't remember history

The SHARE_HISTORY option seems to work for me as a fix. Closing the terminal by typing “exit” also seems to work. This wasn’t necessary earlier though.

As far as I know I’m using defaults for the terminal. I just checked it with a VSCode Insiders download without any plugin or setting changes and I had the same problem there.

Tldr, for now use “exit” every time to save history, or: open ~/.zshrc And add: setopt SHARE_HISTORY

Shells generally have different behaviour concerning histories and VSCode simply exacerbates it by not closing them correctly, especially on Windows in particular (afaik).

Bash will generally only save the history for the last interactive (-i) login (--login) shell that has been properly terminated. Otherwise the export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a' workaround is required, regardless of VSCode or not. See interactive behavour in the manual.

In case of ZSH there are options such as setting SHARE_HISTORY that may improve the experience beyond what Bash offers natively for example.

To verify what goes wrong on macOS and help debugging efforts you should verify the Terminal setup in VSCode and add that information here.

@KaivG

What is the workaround for windows with git bash? Typing exit manually seems to work, but it is obviously tedious. Where do I have to set export PROMPT_COMMAND=‘history -a’ on windows for git bash?

You should be able to set it in ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc. Find your git bash home with cd ~ && pwd. If neither exists already, pick one and make it. Then restart the shell.

Thanks that worked! Neither file existed, so I created ~/.bash_profile and saved PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a' in it and now the history is kept. Thanks a lot!

@sfboss export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a' is a documented workaround. see also my prior comment, what states that. As far as I understand, this issue ticket is about fixing the problem instead of using workarounds.

This type of issue has been reported a few times and I think we’ve closed them all out

A couple I found by googling “site:github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues shell closing window history”: #37273, #85831, #114164. All about Git Bash. Also related: vscode-docs f0876ad, which changed docs to say this is by-design, and to workaround using export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a'.

Today I encountered a Stack Overflow question about a user experiencing the same issue with a Zsh shell.

I found I that I experience the same issue with a Bash shell on Ubuntu with VS Code 1.77.1 installed as a Snap. My Bash shell in the VS Code interactive terminal is an interactive, non-login shell. Opening a login sub-shell with bash -l makes no difference: History is not saved to the histfile when closing the VS Code window. I have not set export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a'.

Let me know if I should create a new issue ticket that is not specific to Windows (since this one currently is).

Loosely related in the Window Terminal repo: microsoft/terminal#7826.

This type of issue has been reported a few times and I think we’ve closed them all out, let’s track in this one. This works fine in pwsh, I believe this is because pwsh persists history to disk as you type, whereas git bash does it when the process shuts down. Something about how we’re shutting down the terminal processes doesn’t let git bash persist to disk.

Maybe the problem code is here where we kill all processes before closing the conpty pty: https://github.com/microsoft/node-pty/blob/1674722e1caf3ff4dd52438b70ed68d46af83a6d/src/windowsPtyAgent.ts#L161-L168

We tweaked what happens here a bunch to try stop processes leaking which is why we go through and kill all processes in GetConsoleProcessList. Maybe we could try calling native.kill() and then giving it some time to finish before going through and killing the process list?