Support for Multiple Shells in New Terminal

[G36maid]

Currently, Zed's integrated terminal only supports the system's default shell.
In contrast, editors like VSCode allow users to choose from a list of available shells—such as bash, zsh, and even terminal multiplexers like tmux (not a shell, but still useful in terminal workflows).

It would be great if Zed could provide similar functionality:

• Detect valid shells from '/etc/shells'
• Allow users to choose a default shell in settings
• Optionally support launching with tools like tmux

This would make Zed more flexible for developers with custom shell environments.

[gmontcheuil]

This is very useful for me, especially on Windows, where I set git bash as my default terminal but need sometime open another terminal with PowerShell or cmd ;-)

[JonGretar]

This is very useful for me, especially on Windows, where I set git bash as my default terminal but need sometime open another terminal with PowerShell or cmd ;-)

Well.. There is currently no way to show some sort of a dialog of available shells. But does not only supports the system's default shell

Changing the default shell is a relatively simple config change: https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#terminal-shell

And if you have multiple shells that you would like to start in. You can create tasks around those, and bind those tasks to a custom keymap.

[gmontcheuil]

Thank you for this very good tip !

A small drawback is it starts/runs two processes: the "shell" one and the "command" one.

It's not well documented in https://zed.dev/docs/tasks, but based on the "shell" parameter, zed will add the necessary options to call the "command" inside the shell (b.e. -i -c '<command>' for bash, -C '<command>' for PowerShell, ....).

I.e. the task {"command": "powershell", "shell": "system", ...} will spawn (with PowerShell as the system shell) powershell.exe -C 'powershell' ⇒ two PowerShell are started and run ;-/

[ziad-2005]

VScode can add multiple shells with the ability to edit it's theme or a prerun functionality,i needed to add MINGW64 shell to work with Cpp projects , it's it was so easy to setup it in my User settings.json

[gmontcheuil]

VScode can add multiple shells with the ability to edit it's theme or a prerun functionality,i needed to add MINGW64 shell to work with Cpp projects , it's it was so easy to setup it in my User settings.json

@ziad-2005, have a look to tasks documentation:

Tasks can be defined:

• in the global tasks.json file; such tasks are available in all Zed projects you work on. This file is usually located in ~/.config/zed/tasks.json. You can edit them by using the zed: open tasks action.
• in the worktree-specific (local) .zed/tasks.json file; such tasks are available only when working on a project with that worktree included. You can edit worktree-specific tasks by using the zed: open project tasks action.
• on the fly with oneshot tasks. These tasks are project-specific and do not persist across sessions.
• by language extension.

The first time you open the (project) tasks setting with zed: open [project] tasks command, zed generates a pretty well commented sample task.

If you would an interactive MINGW64 shell, set it as the command section with the adequate args (no need to change the default shell that will just start your interactive shell)...
And to run a specific command to compile your project (or any other task), set your MINGW64 shell in the shell section and your command in command and args.

In both case, it's true that you cannot set a custom icon or theme from the zed settings ;-/