Launching an editor from the terminal

From the terminal you can use all of the commands we have already seen as well as launch graphical programs.

Action	Command	Description
Open a file to edit	`code`	Launch Visual Studio Code to edit a file or folder.

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a graphical text editor designed to write source code. You can launch Visual Studio Code using the code command in the terminal. The Visual Studio Code documentation describes how to use this in detail, including how to install this shortcut if you have built your own setup.

The code command can be passed an argument to indicate the file or folder you want to open. For example, code . will launch VS Code and have it open the folder from the current working directory. Use code Program.cs to open VS Code with the Program.cs file.

cd ~/Documents/Code/HelloWorld
code .
# launch VS Code with the HelloWorld folder open

We will explore how to get this all setup and ready to go in the next section.

Remember to adjust the path to your Documents’ folder if you are using MSYS2 on Windows. For me, the first step of the above will become:

cd /c/Users/andrew/Documents/Code/HelloWorld