Recognize the new Windows Terminal from a PowerShell script

Question

I'm writing a new PowerShell script, and I want to make use of unicode emojies, which are now supported by the new Windows Terminal Preview. However, for a user running "legacy" PowerShell that doesn't support it, I do not wish to show the unrecognized characters, and instead I would like to show him some other text/sign.

To be more simple - I would like to know when my PS script is running in the new Terminal and show one thing and show something else for other PS terminals.

I have tried using $env:TERM_PROGRAM. If I use is inside the vscode PS terminal it returns "vscode", but under normal PS terminal or new terminal it returns nothing.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Windows Terminal is still in its infancy and not much to go by to identify it but I noticed that it adds an environment variable WT_SESSION, you might try checking for that:

if ($env:WT_SESSION) {
     "I am in Windows Terminal"
} else {
     "Nothing to see here..."
}

Answer 2

An alternative to the other answer without dependency on environment, you can check the process parent stack for the Terminal executable:

$isTerminal = {
    $p = Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Process -Filter ProcessID=$PID
    while ($p) {
        ($p = Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Process -Filter ProcessID=$($p.ParentProcessID) -ErrorAction Ignore)
    }
}.Invoke().Name -contains 'WindowsTerminal.exe'

This is a method I've used to determine whether I'm in conemu.