Make it possible to tell if a tab currently has focus

[dgl]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

It would be useful for a program running in a terminal to be able to tell whether it currently has focus. My use case for this is after a command finishes, I sometimes want my shell to ring the bell, which makes me notice the terminal, but this is annoying if I currently have the window focused.

The FocusIn/FocusOut reporting alone isn't enough, as that needs a focus change to happen and it's not always possible to have reporting on when running an arbitrary program.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

There is some discussion on https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/480052/how-do-i-detect-whether-my-terminal-has-focus-in-the-gui-from-a-shell-script

Apparently GNOME based terminals (VTE) send an event immediately when FocusIn/FocusOut reporting is turned on. In some ways this would be the easiest way to implement this, as other terminals do already do it, so programs have to handle this. If other terminals weren't doing it, I would be against it, but given they are programs have to deal with it anyway.

Alternatively maybe wt.exe could allow querying for whether a $WT_SESSION currently has focus (although the details of that seem harder, some X11 terminals have a $WINDOWID which directly corresponds to the X11 window ID, I don't know how to go from the guid session ID to anything useful).

[carlos-zamora]

Thanks for filing this! The VT approach is probably best. @j4james what do you think?

[j4james]

It seems like a reasonable extension, but this is xterm's protocol, so it should be up to Thomas to decide whether it's OK to change or not. If xterm decides to support the extension, then I'd be OK with us adopting it too. Otherwise I'd be hesitant to encourage what could be a breaking change so someone else's protocol.

[zadjii-msft]

Taking a step back: if your goal is ultimately:

My use case for this is after a command finishes, I sometimes want my shell to ring the bell, which makes me notice the terminal, but this is annoying if I currently have the window focused

#7955 has quite a bit of related discussion. Especially in #7955 (comment). I believe the "$profile.notifyOnNextPrompt": "audible" would basically be what you're looking for/?

[microsoft-github-policy-service]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has been marked as requiring author feedback but has not had any activity for 4 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs within 3 days of this comment.