[Bug] Empty/debug conhost shells created from shims

[brian6932]

Bug Report

Current Behavior

When shims are opened from explorer/start menu/run, they have to spawn an extra conhost shell, then the program itself as a sub-process.

Expected Behavior

This is not ideal, you end up with either an empty shell, or a debug shell, and it looks very ugly for programs like terminal emulators, or browsers. Especially for use cases like wanting to spawn a shell from a path when you're already in explorer, normally you'd just alt+d->program_name.

Possible Solution

Instead there should be some way to contextually start shells. I know there are some Windows API limitations here, but maybe some way toggle CREATE_NO_WINDOW as a shim prop, there are prob smarter ways of handling this.

The alternative is to append $env:PATH with env_add_path, often times this is not ideal, and can lead to path pollution. Another challenge to a solution here would be whether or not it would be possible to launch from some type of symlink-like link to the bin, and having it work as a nested dir, then you could accomplish this effectively without polluting path (I don't believe such a solution is easily possible on Windows, as symlinks and junctions don't behave this way, but maybe there is some type of solution like this).

Before anyone says anything like just & (scoop which shim | cvpa), often times your native shell on Windows will not be pwsh/powershell, so this is simply not feasible.

Screenshots

System details

Windows version: 10

OS architecture: 64bit

PowerShell version: 7.4.0-preview.3

[rashil2000]

Duplicate of #1606

[brian6932]

That's a bit general, but sure