Use fresh environment block on new terminals in Windows

At the moment, if any environment variables change, or new “apps” are installed while VS Code is running, in order for those changes to be recognized VS Code needs to be closed and re-open.

For instance, when running npm i -g <something> or choco install <package> in another prompt or powershell window, those new commands are not recognized until the app is rebooted.

It would be great if adding a new terminal instance with + would load these new variables/apps/notsurewhatterminologytouse.

[MirzaSikander]

Okay so I think I found two different issues.

• You do need to kill all instances to refresh environment variables. This is easy to repro.

1. Start 2 vscode instances pointing to different directories.
2. Add a new env variable through System Properties > Environement variables called TEST
3. Check $env:TEST in both instances. Result: Not updated.
4. Restart one instance by killing it and then using Open folder to open the directory. Check again. Result: Not updated.
5. Restart both instances by killing both and using Open folder. Check again. Result: Updated.

• The second issue is that if you open your workspaces using links under Recent, you will find that even after restarting VSCode, the environment variables are not updated.

1. Start one instance.
2. Update env variable.
3. Kill instance.
4. Open VScode by right clicking on Task bar and selecting the folder from Recent Workspaces
5. Check env variable. Result: Not updated.

[edwin-hendriks]

I am a teacher on the Radboud University in the Netherlands and my students have a lot of problems with this issue. Most work on Windows 10 and for them the easiest work around is to restart their computers. Because this is counter intuitive, it often takes them a while to figure out how to solve it. So fixing this issue would be a great help to me and my students.