I saw a Tweet today from Kayla Cinnamon: https://twitter.com/cinnamon_msft/status/1455946220476657665. Here’s the Tweet.

Although she wrote to type Alt+Shift+D, she obviously didn’t mean it that way. I looked past that, although some of the comments proved that others did not. I quickly figured out what it did and then I determined how to not use that keyboard key combination. Before we see that, let’s determine what Alt+Shift+D does.

Alt+Shift+D opens up a new terminal, or rather, it duplicates the pane. If you take a look at the Settings menu you’ll quickly discover a large number of other fun surprises (a.k.a. keyboard key combinations). Someday, I’ll take the time and work through those.

Anyway, here’s what you shouldn’t do.

[PS7.1.5][C:\] Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
[PS7.1.5][C:\] 1..10 | ForEach-Object {[System.Windows.Forms.SendKeys]::SendWait('%+D')}

This lovely piece of frustration — if you can sneak it into a “friend’s” profile script — will add the System.Windows.Forms assembly and then send in the Alt+Shift+D key combination for each iteration through the ForEach-Object loop. In this example, it would be a total of ten times. So it’s been said, the SendWait method includes “%” and “+” in addition to the letter “D.” As you may have already guessed, if you didn’t know, these two symbols are used for Alt and Shift, respectively. So what’s this produce? It does what a good number of people that replied to Kayla’s Tweet showed us they could do by repetitively pressing the key combination. That said, why do it manually? It’s PowerShell!

Back to when she said to “type” the keyboard command. It did make me think to do something with the string value Alt+Shift+D.

In the top-left pane, which was the only one when I started, I created a function called Alt+Shift+D. It included the two commands from earlier. Then I tested it/invoked my new function and it added the pane on the right side. Then I created an alias for my function, because who wants to type out the entirety of Alt+Shift+D each time — not me — and tested it too. It opened the bottom-left pane. If you aren’t using Windows Terminal then you should be; it continues to get better all the time.