A more integrated terminal experience

Ruben Rios

As part of the new additions of the Visual Studio 2019 v16.8 release, and thanks to your feedback, we have added a couple new tricks to the integrated terminal! It now allows you to open a new terminal to a location based on your Solution Explorer selection and provides customizable commands for copy and paste.

 

Solution Explorer integration

A new context menu command allows you to open the terminal in a specific path. To use this feature simply select the solution, project, or folder node you want to navigate to, open the item’s context menu and select the “Open in Terminal” command.

When working on solutions with multiple projects or long nested folder structures, you can use this method to quickly navigate to a terminal at the selected location. Saving you the typing and helping speed up your workflow.

This capability is only available when you use the “Solution view” in Solution Explorer, and not in the “Folder view” option, or when selecting multiple, virtual, or unloaded folders. However, we are looking to expand these capabilities soon.

Toolbar commands

You’ll notice a couple of new toolbar buttons alongside those used to open new terminal instances. We added copy and paste commands and a shortcut for easier access to the terminal settings.

To avoid disruptions with the “interrupt” command (Ctrl+C) used in many command lines, the default experience uses Ctrl+Shift+C & Ctrl+Shift+V as the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste. However, you can easily customize them to your needs.

To customize these keyboard shortcuts, search (Ctrl+Q) for “key bindings” or go to the Options > Environment > Keyboard dialog, then select and edit the respective copy or paste command as follows:

Wrapping up

We hope you enjoy these new capabilities and would love to hear from you!

Let us know what you think about the terminal, what new features you would like to see supported and how we can further improve things to better fit your workflow! Send us your feedback via the Developer Community portal, or via the Help > Send Feedback feature inside Visual Studio.