Ability to disable line wrapping in Windows Terminal

[CHerSun]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

Currently Windows Terminal wraps lines by default. It would be great to give an option (in settings json) or a shortcut to toggle line wrapping.

Why? One of the reasons are tables printed in console, like "oc get all" for OpenShift. Table lines get wrapped, sometimes more than once - this makes table unreadable (example from my mini cluster, on normal cluster all the tables would be much longer):

Without line wrapping last table would be perfectly readable.

Another example - Linux messages log. 1 message per line would be perfect, but with line wrapping output becomes a mess.

I saw several closed issues on this, but none of them had clear reason why this feature is requested. Like, #6378 , #1860,

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

How? I don't know internal structure of Windows terminal, but I suspect it should be possible to make width larger than window width and use something like a viewport with horizontal scrollbar.

From configuration point of view - it could be one of the options in settings (i.e. separate profile with wrapping disabled), or like this is done in VScode - a shortcut:

    

[DHowett]

Thanks for the request! This is one of the things we're absolutely not going to do -- it's been discussed in a couple different places across the repository, but it all comes back to the same problem: we're not going to add a horizontal scroll bar, because no terminal anywhere has a horizontal scroll bar. The windows console host caused so much trouble by allowing the text buffer to be wider than the actual screen.
/dup #1860, with more info at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=769440#c1 (for gnome-terminal, one of our peers)

[ghost]

Hi! We've identified this issue as a duplicate of another one that already exists on this Issue Tracker. This specific instance is being closed in favor of tracking the concern over on the referenced thread. Thanks for your report!

[imthenachoman]

because no terminal anywhere has a horizontal scroll bar

Is WS Terminal trying to be like every other terminal or better/best?

[r0hit05]

Windows terminal seems to wrap text even when there is enough space or the window has been stretched enough. Is there a way to make sure that it wraps only when needed? That way there is no horizontal scroll bar either.

[DHowett]

Windows terminal seems to wrap text even when there is enough space or the window has been stretched enough

This happens in 2 cases.

1. An application is manually wrapping text, and it has measured the width wrong
2. An application has explicitly set the width to be narrower than the terminal

[tfiers]

A semi workaround: temporarily decrease the font size (ctrl-minus)

[marek-stoj]

because no terminal anywhere has a horizontal scroll bar

Is WS Terminal trying to be like every other terminal or better/best?

In Visual Studio Code we can open a terminal in Editor Area and it does support word wrapping and horizontal scrolling.

[tfiers]

fyi, upvote #1860 to get this higher on the priority list

(zadjii-msft: "We've got to prioritize all community asks, and the best way we can do that is with 👍's on issues. As of right now, this issue isn't even on the first 3 pages of microsoft/terminal/issues (is:open sort:reactions-+1-desc").
(It's on page 2 now!)

[imthenachoman]

@DHowett

because no terminal anywhere has a horizontal scroll bar

Command prompt does. And isn't Microsoft trying to replace Command Prompt with Terminal? Can't exactly call it a upgrade replacement if it can't do the same thing.

[DHowett]

You've all made good points in favor of this feature. Thanks! I'd love to redirect you to #1860 (and am locking this issue to move discussion over there).