Running Visual Studio Code on macOS from the terminal

For running Visual Studio Code from the terminal, you need to do a few extra steps as from Running Visual Studio Code on macOS: Get Visual Studio Code up and running on Mac (macOS):

Launching from the Command Line

You can also run VS Code from the terminal by typing ‘code’ after adding it to the path:

1. Launch VS Code.
2. Open the Command Palette (⇧⌘P) and type ‘shell command’ to find the Shell Command: Install ‘code’ command in PATH command.

• Restart the terminal for the new $PATH value to take effect. You’ll be able to type ‘code .’ in any folder to start editing files in that folder.

Note: If you still have the old code alias in your .bash_profile (or equivalent) from an early VS Code version, remove it and replace it by executing the Shell Command: Install ‘code’ command in PATH command.

To manually add VS Code to your path:

cat << EOF >> ~/.bash_profile
# Add Visual Studio Code (code)
export PATH="\$PATH:/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/bin"
EOF

This is what the code command is and does:

$ which code
/usr/local/bin/code
$ ls -alh `which code`
lrwxr-xr-x  1 jeroenp  admin    68B Apr 16 13:24 /usr/local/bin/code -> /Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/bin/code
$ cat `which code`
#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
# Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
# Licensed under the MIT License. See License.txt in the project root for license information.

function realpath() { /usr/bin/python -c "import os,sys; print(os.path.realpath(sys.argv[1]))" "$0"; }
CONTENTS="$(dirname "$(dirname "$(dirname "$(dirname "$(realpath "$0")")")")")"
ELECTRON="$CONTENTS/MacOS/Electron"
CLI="$CONTENTS/Resources/app/out/cli.js"
ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE=1 "$ELECTRON" "$CLI" "$@"
exit $?

–jeroen