Tab text vs. window text

[vefatica]

What's going on?

[DHowett]

Sorry, can you explain the problem you're seeing?

There are hidden windows that have titles. I'm assuming you tore 12144 out of a Terminal window, so we hid it and never changed the title.

The tab is not a window, and therefore none of the tabs will show up in Spy++.

[vefatica]

What about the hidden windows? Can't their titles be accurate? The problem is that what I see doesn't seem to correspond to reality.

[DHowett]

Why bother? They don't contain anything.

[vefatica]

I'm trying to figure out what window my shell is in, that's all. Tearout/in has made doing that more complicated.

[DHowett]

Tearout/merging only made it more complicated if your programming model was built with the incorrect assumption that console applications could never be hosted anywhere but a single window. 🙂

Using the title to detect which window holds your current shell is never going to be reliable. Terminal might one day update to put tab information (like "Command Prompt (+3 more)") in the title, or worse. You could disable title updates. You could be running one shell in a non-active pane, and its title will never make it out to the window until it becomes focused.

Use GetAncestor(GetConsoleWindow(), GA_ROOTOWNER) and you will always get the window hosting your shell. Anything else is just a poor heuristic.

[vefatica]

I don't use the title. My notion of the Cascadia window is GetParent(GetConsoleWindow()).

Is that reliable? Will GetAncestor() with GA_ROOTOWNER work any better?

I reckon one of those will continue to work if I can determine (without polling) that I need to check again. I'm thinking of a WinEvent hook (EVENT_OBJECT_CREATE/DESTROY) but I haven't tried it yet.

[lhecker]

GetAncestor(GetConsoleWindow(), GA_ROOTOWNER), the way Dustin suggested it, is the correct choice for getting the "parent-most" window. GetParent is not robust enough for that purpose.