Launch VS Code from the Command Line

Quick tip: It’s much better to launch VS Code from the command line. Why? Because this way, the sessions’ environment configuration is used by VS Code, too, and you don’t need to configure the Python interpreter in VS Code.

For example, I often check out a repository with GitHub Desktop and then open the project from GitHub Desktop in VS Code. This way, I also need to configure the Python interpreter in the VS Code workspace. On the other hand, when I open the working copy in the terminal, do the initialization there, and only then launch GitHub Desktop, the Python interpreter is automatically set accordingly.

Here is a step-by-step example with Anaconda. After cloning the repository, I open a terminal in the repositories’ directory and create a new conda environment with:

conda create --name myenv python=3.11

Then I activate the environment with:

conda activate myenv

Now I install the required packages with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Finally, I open the project in VS Code with:

code .

If the last command does not work, launch VS Code, open the command palette withe Ctrl+Shift+P or CMD+Shift+P on the Mac, and type shell command to Install ‘code’ command in PATH. Restart the terminal. Now it should work.