Opening Terminal inside Windows Explorer as a pane (or vice-versa)

[moattarwork]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

All the CMD terminals can be initiate from windows explorer which creates two windows to work with. In some development environments such as VSCode etc, you can combine the terminal to your IDE which is very helpful.

It would be very helpful if we can open the terminal in Windows Explorer so we can have access visually to the files and through the terminal. Also, they can be synced when we change the folder to the other location.

[zadjii-msft]

So this is a neat idea, though something that would be largely really hard to implement.

Say we were able to put a Terminal instance within explorer.exe. When the user navigates files in explorer, I'm not sure there's any good way for something like explorer to be able to change the working directory of cmd or powershell. Further, what would happen if there was something that wasn't a shell running in the Terminal instance? What if you were running the python REPL? What if you were running some sort of webserver, or msbuild? What if you ran ssh user@some-other-server in the Terminal? What would changing the directory in explorer.exe do then?

I think largely it would be really hard for changing the directory in explorer to have an effect on the Terminal that would be embedded in it. It would probably be at best capable of starting in the current directory that explorer was in.

It's also hard for the Terminal to report which directory it is in, and when the directory changes, for much of the same reason. I'd refer to #3158 for more details on this topic.

That being said, I think it would be a cool extension once #3158 landed for the Terminal to be able to display the CWD contents. For that reason alone, I'm linking this to #4000

[aminya]

I wish there was a collapsable pane on the sides of the terminal that showed an explorer, and I could navigate through the files and folders using it and tell the terminal to cd here, etc.

[just1a-person]

Idea: Preview Pane Handler?