Wrong terminal in dev containers

[sgraband]

Bug Description:

When opening a development container, the terminal that is opened defaults to a simple sh shell rather than the user's configured default terminal (such as bash, zsh, etc.), which is the case in a normal workspace. This behavior is inconsistent and can cause confusion, as users might expect the same terminal configuration in both normal workspaces and development containers.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open a normal workspace and observe that the terminal uses the user's default shell (e.g., bash, zsh).
2. Open the same workspace as a development container.
3. Observe that the terminal defaults to sh instead of the user's default terminal.

Expected Behavior:

The terminal in a development container should respect the user's default shell, just as it does in a normal workspace.

Additional Information:

• Operating System: Ubuntu 22.04
• Theia Version: v1.54.0

[jonah-iden]

This should probably be fixed through #14548 as well

[jonah-iden]

@sgraband To continue the discussion from the PR here:
So what you were saying is, when connected to a dev container the default terminal should always be bash (execpt of course if something else is configured).
You are on Linux right? Is theias default terminal on linux normally bash or did you have to configure that?
If you had to configure it then maybe it would rather be better to in general use bash as default if installed. Maybe add a small check somewhere in the terminal package

[sgraband]

Yes i am on Linux. Theias default Terminal is afaik (i haven't found any settings i made in this regard) the default shell of the users system (in my case zsh). This would of course be the ideal solution, but this is probably hard to do in the dev-container i assume.

(I have "terminal.integrated.profiles.linux": null locally as well on the dev-container.)

The thing is that the default shell in the dev-container is basically unusable in most of the devcontainers i am using, switching by hand to bash always improves the situation (and is the behaviour expected by users migrating from VSCode).

I'm not sure if this comes from the way the remote is setup or if we somehow set the terminal to a shell because we could not load the users configuration.

[jonah-iden]

yeah if the default terminal is configured outside of theia we can't really reach that from inside the dev-container. I'll check tomorrow how the terminal package determines that. Maybe i can find a way to transfer this configuration to the dev-container
Thanks for the explanation