one of the apps on my start menu lost its icon, but it still works?

the weird thing is that the only option I have now is to unpin it... which does nothing. it stays pinned.

ok. deleting the shortcut from the windows start menu... brought back the icon.

computers are stupid

unfortunately the shortcut on the start menu was how it was hotkeyed so now my hotkey is broken

windows really doesn't want you to have a shortcut to an app, does it?

OK So I made a subfolder in my start menu called "Foone Things", with some boring AHK thing and then WINDOWS TERMINAL ZBEBA, right? so let's search for zbeba...

windows: HAVE YOU TRIED BINGING FOR SOME FOOTBALL IN INTERNET EXPLORER?

it's just refusing to see the shortcut I made, because it hates me.

Windows: I know you named a shortcut with zbeba in it, but since I hate it, I'm just gonna tell you to go search the store instead

I guess the only way to consistently get a shortcut to an app that actually works is to make a dummy program, make a shortcut to that, then program the dummy program to launch the app?

so, wait, it's not the fact it's an app after all?
I instead made a shortcut to a wget.exe file, and called it wget zbeba:

oh wait, no, it is because it's an app.
I tried again and HEY LOOK IT FINDS WGET ZBEBA JUST FINE! SHORTCUTS ARE FINE

how am I supposed to make a hotkey to an app, windows 10?

did you forget you had support for hotkey launching of programs since windows 95 and didn't backport that functionality into windows store apps?

windows 10: you want to launch a terminal with a HOTKEY?! I don't know, that seems kinda complicated, I don't think we can support that...

windows 95: oh yeah that's like 3 clicks.

OK let's try to stop hacking and doing things magically. So I want a shortcut to an app, right? Let's go to create shortcut.
"Type the location of the item", eh? typing just "Windows Terminal" doesn't work, so... browse? WHERE ARE APPS LOCATED, WINDOWS?

fortunately there's an easy way around this. See, when you go to the windows start menu, you can right click on a program (like Audacity), go to More, then there's Open file location, right?

So let's just do that to Windows Terminal, and... oh.
There's no more. there's no open location. there's no shortcuts. I can rate the app or share it with my friends, though?

it's not under App Settings either, but at least I can configure all my COMMAND PROMPT DLC

so it turns out you can drag the shortcuts out, as long as you don't search. if you search, drag and drop gets disabled.
this is because of Reasons.
But hey, now I have a shortcut on the desktop! Surely I can name that "Windows Zbeba" and put it in my start menu and have it work?

hey, there it is! Surely it'll show up in search now

surely

oh

FORTUNATELY it technically works even if I can search for it.
There's just two minor problems:
1. it takes 4 entire seconds to launch. Clicking a link in the start menu is instant, however
2. clicking a link on the taskbar gives me a permissions error

This windows apps thing is gonna be really great when they work out all these early teething issues. It's totally understandable that they don't work 100% yet, this Windows Store thing only launched last... 2012?

also why is the taskbar configuration apparently inside the INTERNET EXPLORER settings?
MICROSOFT WHAT ARE YOU DOING

the fun thing about all this problem is that making hotkeys to apps is clearly possible:
if your keyboard has a calculator key, pressing it will take you to the Calculator, which is an app now.

gonna go find the manual for my keyboard (BECAUSE THAT'S A THING THAT EXISTS) and see if I can get it to start sending the calculator key instead

OK after finding the manual to my keyboard and resetting the profiles, I now have my terminal button sending a "calculator" key.
and thanks to some registry editing, my calculator key now launches a slightly different app... the windows terminal.

this could have been a lot simpler, microsoft

this windows thing is neat but I don't think it's really ready for the average user, yet. it's not user friendly enough, clearly.

someone* pointed out that you can do this in Windows 3.1 too

*I'm not sure whobecause the tweet seems to have disappeared off my notifications

windows 10 pro/cons:
+ modern start menu for easy launching
- can't make keyboard shortcuts to the console
windows 3.1 pro/cons:
+ can make shortcut to the console
+ sweet dinosaur background
+ skifree

ahh, it was @txgx42: https://twitter.com/txgx42/status/1285604292557144066

and if you're looking for an easier way to do this, @FlavienLefebvre pointed out that there's a "wt" command that launches windows terminal.
So you can make a shortcut to that instead, and the shortcut now functions normally, showing up in searches and everything.

it also doesn't suffer the really slow launch that a direct shortcut link has.

and if it wasn't clear, I'm talking about Windows Terminal, not the Command Prompt.
Windows Terminal is a newer app that adds tabs and better copy/paste behavior and lets you easily do things like powershell and ubuntu in the same window. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal