Do you want to bind a terminal command to VSCode keyboard shortcut?
A software developer often has to run the same command over and over again, for example, to run a Node.js live development server.
In this case, opening Terminal a couple of times a day becomes a boring task. What if we can bind a keyboard shortcut to the command and run it right inside VSCode?
This article is going to show you how to run terminal commands from inside VSCode quickly using a keyboard shortcut.
Suppose we had Nodejs and Live Server installed, we want to run live-server --port=3000 --browser=Firefox to run a local dev server and open it with Firefox.
Next thing you need to open Command Palette and find Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON).
Add the following lines to the file, inside the brackets.
{
"key": "shift + l",
"command": "workbench.action.terminal.sendSequence",
"args": {
"text": "live-server --port=3000 --browser=Firefox\u000D"
}
}In the snippets above, we bind Shift + L to the workbench.action.terminal.sendSequence action with our command as the argument.
Note that we added \u000D to the end of the terminal command, which translates to a newline character (\n), equivalent to a Enter key press into VSCode integrated terminal.
Follow the same process, you can bind any other keyboard shortcuts to terminal commands.
We hope that you’ve learned how to quickly run a terminal command from VSCode using a key combination. Here’s a few of our other VSCode guides if you’re interested.
- How to quickly create a comment block in VSCode
- How to quickly duplicate a line in Visual Studio Code
- How to comment out multiple lines in Visual Studio Code
- How to automatically indent your code in Visual Studio Code
- VSCode Format On Save – everything you need to know
