Terminal

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.

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

Press Ctrl+Alt+S to open IDE settings and 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/bash
- Z shell: /bin/zsh
- Bash for Windows: bash.exe
- WSL: wsl.exe
- PowerShell: powershell
- Command Prompt: cmd.exe
- Cygwin: "C:\cygwin\bin\bash.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.

Configure Terminal in WSL

To run Terminal in WSL configuration, open project Settings/Preference (Ctrl+Alt+S) and go to Tools | Terminal.
Type wsl.exe in the Shell path field and click Ok.
Switch to the Terminal tool window and type any command to inspect the output.

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.

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.

If you want to disable this feature, click on the title bar of the Terminal window and clear the Run Commands using IDE option.

Last modified: 14 May 2021