How to launch the terminal inside Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio is a powerful and feature-packed IDE from Microsoft with tons of features to enhance developer productivity. It supports the launch of multiple command Shells and PowerShell terminals inside Visual Studio itself as a tab. This means that you don’t have to switch between various windows to work with multiple shells.

How to open the terminal in Visual Studio

We can use any one of the following ways to open the terminal:

• Select the View Menu > Terminal option to launch the terminal as a Tab in Visual Studio.

• A faster way to launch the terminal is to use the default keyboard shortcut Ctrl +`tilde or backquote key.

• 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.

Terminal settings

• 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.

• You can also set a shell as your default terminal: Go to Terminal Window > Settings and select the Set as default option after you choose from a list of available shells.

• Use the Terminal Settings window to add or remove shells. Click on Add, provide the name of the new terminal, the shell exe path, and default arguments, and click on OK.
• Use the + Developer Command Prompt button in the terminal window to open multiple terminal windows.
• Use the copy and paste buttons available in the terminal window Toolbar to easily copy and paste text.