Open Terminal In Visual Studio 2017
Phyllis Sterlin
Visual Studio Developer PowerShell - More powerful than a command prompt. For example, you can pass the output of one command (known as a cmdlet) to another cmdlet. This shell has the same environment variables set as Developer Command Prompt. Available since Visual Studio 2019.
Starting in Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio includes an integrated terminal that can host either of these shells (Developer Command Prompt and Developer PowerShell). You can also open multiple tabs of each shell. The Visual Studio terminal is built on top of Windows Terminal. To open the terminal in Visual Studio, select View > Terminal.
When you open one of the developer shells from Visual Studio, either as a separate app or in the Terminal window, it opens to the directory of your current solution (if you have a solution loaded). This behavior makes it convenient to run commands against the solution or its projects.
Both shells have specific environment variables set that enable you to use command-line developer tools more easily. After opening one of these shells, you can enter the commands for different utilities without having to know where they're located.
If you have other SDKs installed, such as the Windows SDK or previous versions, you may see additional command prompts. Check the documentation for the individual tools to determine which version of the command prompt you should use.
Usually, the shortcuts for the shells you have installed are placed in the Start Menu folder for Visual Studio, such as in %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Visual Studio 2019\Visual Studio Tools. But if searching for the command prompt doesn't produce the expected results, you can try to manually locate the files on your machine.
Search for the name of the command prompt file, which is VsDevCmd.bat, or go to the Tools folder for Visual Studio, such as %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\Common7\Tools (the path changes according to your Visual Studio version, edition, and installation location).
Since Visual Studio 2015, the Developer Command Prompt sets the VSCMD_VER environment variable which contains the version information for Visual Studio (ex: 17.9.0). If you need to detect whether the Developer Command Prompt has already been run in your console, it is recommended to check whether VSCMD_VER has been defined or not.
Search for a PowerShell script file named Launch-VsDevShell.ps1, or go to the Tools folder for Visual Studio, such as %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools. (The path changes according to your Visual Studio version, edition, and installation location.) Once you've located the PowerShell file, run it by entering the following command at a Windows PowerShell or PowerShell 6 prompt.
The Launch-VsDevShell.ps1 script works by locating the Microsoft.VisualStudio.DevShell.dll PowerShell module in the Visual Studio installation path, loading it, and then invoking the Enter-VsDevShell cmdlet. Installed shortcuts, like those in the Start menu, load the module and invoke the cmdlet directly. Launch-VsDevShell.ps1 is the recommended way to initialize Developer PowerShell interactively or for scripting build automation.
For build tools -- like the C++ compiler -- that create outputs targeting specific CPU architectures, the developer shells can be configured using the appropriate command-line argument. The architecture of the build tool binaries can also be configured by using command-line arguments. This is useful when the build machine is a different architecture than the target architecture.
If you set only Target Architecture, the shells attempt to make the Host Architecture match. This can result in errors when only the Target Architecture is set to a value that's not also supported by Host Architecture.
For Developer PowerShell, the starting directory of the shell is the Visual Studio Project Location. This default locale overrides any other paths, such as working directory. This behavior can be turned off by using the command-line argument -SkipAutomaticLocation. This can be useful if you want the shell to stay in the current directory after initialization.
We can use the context menu from the Solution Explorer to open the terminal at a specific file path. For this, we select the folder in the Solution Explorer window and right-click and select the Open in Terminal option to open the context menu.
If you launch the terminal, it automatically opens an integrated PowerShell instance. However, you can set up shell profiles to customize this startup experience. This can target different types of shells like a command shell, PowerShell, or any custom shell, and use different arguments to invoke them.
will print the path. command is a bit more reliable than which. VS Code is an Electron application (i.e. Chrome/node) and the launcher is a little wonky. For example, xdg-open does not work well for me.
NOTE ABOUT INSIDERS VERSION:As Nicholas Humphrey points out in the comments, it could also be called code-insiders if you installed the insiders version. This allows you to have side-by-side installations of regular and insider versions.
Correct way is to open Visual Studio Code and press Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows (or Cmd+Shift+P on Mac) then type Install 'code' command in PATH . At some point you should see an option come up that lets you install shell command, click it. Then open a new terminal window and type code.
First, open up your terminal. You can open your terminal in a few ways. One way of opening your terminal is hitting the command button and the spacebar at the same time. This opens spotlight search. From here, you can type "terminal".
Visual Studio Code includes a full featured integrated terminal that starts at the root of your workspace. It provides integration with the editor to support features like links and error detection. The integrated terminal can run commands such as mkdir and git just like a standalone terminal.
Remove terminal instances by hovering a tab and selecting the Trash Can button, selecting a tab item and pressing Delete, using Terminal: Kill the Active Terminal Instance command, or via the right-click context menu.
Icons may appear to the right of the terminal title on the tab label when a terminal's status changes. Some examples are a bell (macOS) and for tasks, displaying a check mark when there are no errors and an X otherwise. Hover the icon to read status information, which may contain actions.
You can open terminals in the editor area (terminal editors) with the Terminal: Create New Terminal in Editor Area command, the Terminal: Create New Terminal in Editor Area to the Side command, or by dragging a terminal from the terminal view into the editor area. Terminal editors are presented like regular editor tabs:
The content in the terminal is called the buffer, with the section right above the bottom viewport being called "scrollback". The amount of scrollback kept is determined by the terminal.integrated.scrollback setting and defaults to 1000 lines.
The terminal features sophisticated link detection with editor integration and even extension contributed link handlers. Hover over a link to display an underline, then hold the Ctrl/Cmd key and click.
File links: Links to files that have been verified to exist on the system. These will open the file in a new editor tab and support many common line/column formats such as file:1:2, file:line 1, column 2.
Word links: Fallback link type that uses the terminal.integrated.wordSeparators setting. The setting defines word boundaries and make nearly all text into words. Activating a word link searches the workspace for the word. If there is a single result it will open, otherwise it will present the search results. Word links are considered "low confidence" and will not show an underline or tooltip unless you hold the Ctrl/Cmd key. They also have limited support for line and column suffixes.
By default, there is a warning when pasting multiple lines, which can be disabled with the terminal.integrated.enableMultiLinePasteWarning setting. This is only done when the shell does not support "bracketed paste mode". When that mode is enabled, the shell is indicating that it can handle multiple line pasting.
Alt and left-click will reposition the cursor to underneath the mouse. This works by simulating arrow keystrokes, which may not work reliably for some shells or programs. This feature can be disabled with the terminal.integrated.altClickMovesCursor setting.
When applications running in the terminal turn on mouse events mode, such as Vim mouse mode, mouse interaction is sent to the application instead of the terminal. This means that clicking and dragging will no longer create a selection. Terminal selection can be forced by holding the Alt key on Windows and Linux, this can also be done with the Option key on macOS but requires enabling the terminal.integrated.macOptionClickForcesSelection setting first.
The terminal view can be maximized by clicking the maximize panel size button with the upwards chevron icon. This will temporarily hide the editors and maximize the panel. This is useful to temporarily focus on a large amount of output. Some developers use VS Code as a standalone terminal by opening a new window, maximizing the panel, and hiding the side bar.
There is a Terminal: Select All command, which is bound to Cmd+A on macOS, but does not have a default keybinding on Windows and Linux as it may conflict with shell hotkeys. To use Ctrl+A to select all, add this custom keybinding:
The Tasks feature can be used to automate the launching of terminals, for example, the following .vscode/tasks.json file will launch a Command Prompt and PowerShell terminal in a single terminal group when the window starts:
Split terminals on Windows will start in the directory that the parent terminal started with. On macOS and Linux, split terminals will inherit the current working directory of the parent terminal. This behavior can be changed using the terminal.integrated.splitCwd setting:
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