How to access ‘Run Python File in Terminal’ from the Visual Studio Code main window. It’s also much more convenient to be able to run your code directly inside of the IDE without typing commands and managing a separate terminal.

This method does require a little bit of setup, but I’ve found it to be very reliable once the setup is done properly. This command will open a terminal inside of the Visual Studio Code IDE, activate the Python environment you’ve selected, and run the Python script.

Once you have the proper environment set, right-click on the file you want to run (remember in the File Explorer, not Open Editors) and select ‘Run Python File in Terminal’. If it does not, there is an option to manually add an environment. By default, VSC should recognize the Python environments available on your system. Here you can search for ‘Select Python Interpreter’. Second, if you don’t see the Python version in the blue ribbon, you can use Ctrl+Shift+P to open the settings palette.

Output from your script will appear in the external terminal, and you’ll just VSC as a glorified text editor. Open the terminal type python path/to/script.py, hit enter, and your code will run. It’s just what I’m used to, and there’s more room in the code editor to navigate the code without the terminal window pulled up.Īll you need to do this is have a terminal where the python distribution you want to use is set up as the default (so when you start an interactive Python session by typing python you get the version and distribution you expect). To this day I usually open an external command prompt if I’m running a conda-based Python distribution. Nevertheless, it’s simple and the easiest way to get started if you don’t want to spend time figuring out settings inside of Code. Unfortunately, this can also be somewhat inconvenient because you have to open the proper terminal, activate a python environment, then type a command in the terminal whenever you want to run a script. If you want a method to run code in VSC that is guaranteed to work it’s using VSC to write and edit your scripts and then running the scripts from an external command prompt.

Visual studio python