Integrated terminal

The integrated terminal provides a built-in terminal panel in the Godot Editor, similar to VSCode’s integrated terminal or IntelliJ’s embedded terminal. This allows you to run shell commands, build scripts, version control operations, and other terminal tasks without leaving the editor.

Warning

The integrated terminal currently has limited options for customization. Enterprising users may wish to edit the files under addons/godot_xterm/editor_plugins/ until more advanced customization features become available.

Getting started

First, ensure that the plugin has been enabled in the plugin menu. See Enable the plugin for more details.

  1. Open the terminal panel by clicking the “Terminal” button in the bottom panel of the Godot Editor.

  2. In the terminal panel, press the “New Terminal” button (which looks like a plus symbol).

    Empty terminal panel with dock and new terminal buttons highlighted

    Tip

    A new terminal can also be opened with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + T. This shortcut will open the terminal panel in addition to creating a new terminal tab. See the Keyboard shortcuts section for a full list of default shortcuts.

  3. The terminal will open a shell based on your operating system and configuration. It will check for the value of SHELL in environment variables first. If it cannot find one, the terminal opens with a default shell like Bash, PowerShell, or Zsh. The shell’s working directory will be the Godot project’s root (i.e., res://).

    A freshly opened terminal

    Tip

    To get a Bash shell on Windows, you can launch the Godot editor via Git Bash, which will set the appropriate SHELL environment variable.

  4. Enter a basic command like ls, which lists files and directories in the current working directory.

    Output of ls command

Theme

The integrated terminal inherits the editor’s code font and font size settings.

The integrated terminal automatically uses colors from your Godot Editor’s text editor theme. It maps syntax highlighting colors from Editor > Editor Settings > Text Editor > Theme to terminal colors, so changing your editor theme will also change the terminal’s appearance.

Keyboard shortcuts

The integrated terminal supports several keyboard shortcuts:

Shortcut

Action

Ctrl + Shift + T

Open new terminal tab

Ctrl + Shift + X

Close current terminal tab

Ctrl + Shift + C

Copy selected text

Ctrl + Shift + V

Paste from clipboard

Ctrl + PageUp

Switch to previous tab

Ctrl + PageDown

Switch to next tab