Simply said, a Terminal is a CLI (Command Line Interface) to interact with programs in the computer. In Ubuntu you can open a terminal: by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T. By pressing the Super key, type 'terminal' and then hit Enter. You can use the terminal for various tasks, such as.
- Open the Terminal (Mac OS X, Linux) or Command Prompt (Windows) in the given directory via context menu or keyboard shortcut.
- In Visual Studio Code, you can open an integrated terminal, initially starting at the root of your workspace. This can be convenient as you don't have to switch windows or alter the state of an existing terminal to perform a quick command-line task. To open the terminal: Use the Ctrl+` keyboard shortcut with the backtick character.
- Perhaps the easiest way to open terminal window on Ubuntu 20.04 desktop is to use the shortcut CTRL+ALT+T. Entering this shortcut will instantly open the terminal window. Search for keyword terminal within the Activities menu and then click the relevant icon to open new terminal session. Subscribe to RSS and NEWSLETTER and receive latest Linux.
- Windows Terminal. The Windows Terminal is a modern, fast, efficient, powerful, and productive terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, and WSL. Its main features include multiple tabs, panes, Unicode and UTF-8 character support, a GPU accelerated text rendering engine, and custom themes.
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Say you are new to Linux world and just installed Linux desktop and now you would like to fire up terminal window and start issuing commands, but wait you don’t know how to access a terminal window in Linux, in this article I will walk you through how to open a Linux terminal window and set up a keyboard shortcut for easier access.
Before I begin, allow me to explain the basic differences between a shell and a terminal emulator.
The shell
The shell is a command-line interface program that takes commands from the user as an input, processes the command, and prints out the output to the display. In most Linux systems, you will find bash (Bourne Again SHell) installed and is the default, Bash is an enhanced version of Unix shell program sh (shell). Apart from bash, there are other shell programs that can be installed on Linux machines such as ksh, zsh, and csh.
The terminal emulator
Simply put, a Terminal Emulator is a program that allows users to interact with shell in the graphical user interface (GUI) environment.
Some familiar terminal emulators you might find in Linux distros are:
- Gnome-terminal
- Konsole
- xterm
Opening the Linux terminal window
I am using a Centos 8 Machine with the Gnome Desktop Environment. I’m going to show you two different ways to open a Linux terminal window.
Option 1
Gnome desktop environment makes easy access of application, in order to access the terminal window, press the super key (aka Windows key) and you should see Terminal application listed on the left-hand side application pane if you don’t see it listed on here simple start searching for “Terminal” in the search area.
You should see a Terminal Emulator application
Option 2
The other way (my favorite) is to open the terminal window is with a keyboard shortcut. Who doesn’t like to have a keyboard shortcut? Keyboard shortcuts make it easier to launch apps.
You can create a keyboard shortcut to open a terminal window, create a new shortcut, press the super key and search for “keyboard” or “shortcut” and launch it.
IntelliJ IDEA includes an embedded terminal emulator for working with your command-line shell from inside the IDE. Use it to run Java tools, Git commands, set file permissions, and perform other command-line tasks without switching to a dedicated terminal application.
Open Terminal As Root
Initially, the terminal emulator runs with your default system shell, but it supports many other shells such as Windows PowerShell, Command Prompt cmd.exe, sh, bash, zsh, csh, and so on. For information about changing the shell, see Configure the terminal emulator.
Open the Terminal tool window
Select View | Tool Windows | Terminal from the main menu or press Alt+F12.
By default, the terminal emulator runs with the current directory set to the root directory of the current project. You can change the default start directory in Settings/Preferences (Ctrl+Alt+S) | Tools | Terminal.
Alternatively, you can right-click any file (for example, in the Project tool window or any open tab) and select Open in Terminal from the context menu to open the Terminal tool window with a new session in the directory of that file.
Start a new session
Click on the toolbar to start a new session in a separate tab.
To run multiple sessions inside a tab, right-click the tab and select Split Vertically or Split Horizontally in the context menu.
The Terminal saves tabs and sessions when you close the project or IntelliJ IDEA. It preserves tab names, the current working directory, and even the shell history.
To close a tab, click on the Terminal toolbar or right-click the tab and select Close Tab from the context menu.
Press Alt+Right and Alt+Left to switch between active tabs. Alternatively, you can press Alt+Down to see the list of all terminal tabs.
To rename a tab, right-click the tab and select Rename Session from the context menu.
To search for a certain string in a Terminal session, press Ctrl+F. This searches all text in the session: the prompt, commands, and output.
Configure the terminal emulator
In the Settings/Preferences dialog Ctrl+Alt+S, select Tools | Terminal.
Specify the desired shell to use with the embedded terminal emulator, change the start directory, and define environment variables among other settings.
IntelliJ IDEA should automatically detect the default shell based on your environment. Here are some of the possible shells you might consider:
Bash:
/bin/bashZ shell:
/bin/zshBash for Windows:
bash.exeWSL:
wsl.exePowerShell:
powershellCommand Prompt:
cmd.exeCygwin:
'C:cygwinbinbash.exe' --login -i
The embedded terminal emulator also inherits the following IDE settings:
On the Keymap page, you can configure the copy Ctrl+C and paste Ctrl+V shortcuts.
On the Editor | General | Appearance page, you can configure blinking frequency for the caret. The Terminal does not inherit the Use block caret option because it always renders the caret as a block.
On the Editor | Color Scheme | Console Font page, you can configure line spacing and fonts.
On the Editor | Color Scheme | Console Colors page, you can configure font colors.
On the Editor | Color Scheme | General page, you can configure the selection foreground and background colors.
Run IDE features from the terminal
Instead of running a specific command in the integrated terminal and reading console output, you can use the relevant IDE feature, like a tool window or a dialog that implements this functionality. For example, the diff viewer actually runs the diff command in the system shell to produce results. Another example is the Log tab in the Git tool window, which is based on the output of the git log command.
Open the Log tab of the Git tool window from the terminal
Type a supported command in the terminal and notice how it gets highlighted.
Instead of pressing Enter, which runs the command in the terminal, press Ctrl+Enter to open the corresponding GUI element. In this example, it will open the Log tab of the Git tool window and filter commits by authors with “dmitry” in their usernames.
Terminal For Windows
This feature also works with most of the commands recognized by Run Anything (press Ctrl twice), such as mvn, gradle, rake, rails, and so on, depending on what plugins you have installed. To run a highlighted command in debug mode (use the Debug tool window instead of Run) press Ctrl+Shift+Enter.
Open Terminal I3
If you want to disable this feature, click on the title bar of the Terminal window and clear the Run Commands using IDE option.
Open Terminal On Macbook