Visual Studio Code has a powerful command-line interface built-in that lets you control how you launch the editor. You can open files, install extensions, change the display language, and output diagnostics through command-line options (switches).

Visual Studio Code includes a fully featured integrated terminal. You can use it to run commands like echo , ls , and git , just like a standalone terminal. The terminal in VS Code also provides integration with the editor to support features such as links to workspace files and error detection.

This document lists a subset of Visual Studio Code commands that you might use with vscode.commands.executeCommand API. Read the Commands guide for how to use the commands API. The following is a sample of how to open a new folder in VS Code:

The integrated terminal can run commands such as mkdir and git just like a standalone terminal. You can open a terminal as follows: From the menu, use the Terminal > New Terminal or View > Terminal menu commands. From the Command Palette (⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P)), use the View: Toggle Terminal command.

Visual Studio Code's integrated terminal has many advanced features and settings, such as Unicode and emoji support, custom keyboard shortcuts, and automatic replies. This topic explains these advanced features in detail.

VS Code includes a large set of built-in commands that you can use to interact with the editor, control the user interface, or perform background operations. Many extensions also expose their core functionality as commands that users and other extensions can leverage.

This cheat sheet provides a quick overview of the features for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code. You can access GitHub Copilot in VS Code through the Chat view, directly in the editor, from the integrated terminal, and via AI-powered enhancements in the VS Code user interface.

Visual Studio Code has the ability to integrate with common shells, allowing the terminal to understand more about what's actually happening inside the shell. This additional information enables some useful features such as working directory detection and command detection, decorations , and navigation .

Visual Studio Code's integrated terminal allows configuring various profiles to make launching various shells easier.

Command line. VS Code has a powerful command line interface (CLI) which enables you to customize how the editor is launched to support various scenarios. For example, you can start VS Code from the command line to open a diff editor for comparing two files. Make sure the VS Code binary is on your path so you can simply type 'code' to launch VS ...