The Integrated Terminal: Real Shell, Right There

The integrated terminal is a genuine, full shell running inside VS Code — not a limited command box, the actual terminal you'd otherwise open separately.

Ctrl+` toggles the terminal panel — the same shortcut across this entire track, worth having as a reflex from the Editor Tour course onward. It opens already positioned in your current project's root folder.

Multiple terminal instances can run side by side, or in split panes. Click the "+" to open another terminal; click the split icon to divide the panel — genuinely useful for running a dev server in one pane while running commands in another, without losing sight of either.

Choose your actual shell — PowerShell, Command Prompt, Git Bash, WSL, or others — via the dropdown next to the "+" button. Different projects or tasks sometimes genuinely call for a different shell; VS Code doesn't lock you into one.

Terminal profiles let you save named, pre-configured shell setups — a specific shell with specific startup arguments, saved and reusable rather than reconfigured each time you need that combination.

Anything you'd run in a standalone terminal works identically here — this is a real shell process, not a sandboxed or limited command runner. Every command, every tool, every script you already know how to run works exactly the same.

Why this matters for you

Never leaving VS Code for a terminal command — even a complex one — removes a genuine, constant category of context-switching from daily work.

▶️ Before the next lesson

Open the terminal (Ctrl+`) in a real project and run one command you'd normally run in a separate terminal window — confirm it works identically.