"code ." Not working in Command Line for Visual Studio Code on OSX/Mac

Question

The command code . doesn't work in this manual.

All the other steps before that worked. How can I call the Visual Studio Code in an OS X terminal?

pwd

/Users/mona/nodejs/myExpressApp

code .

-bash: code: command not found

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I ended up opening it from within Visual Code Studio by changing the workspace, but why won't that command code . part work?

Answer 1

1. Make sure you drag the Visual Studio Code application into the Applications folder

Otherwise (as noted in the comments), you'll have to go through this process again after a reboot.

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2. Next, open Visual Studio Code

Open the Command Palette via ⇧ + ⌘ + P and type shell command to find the Shell Command:

Use the Uninstall 'code' command in the PATH command before the "Install 'code' command in PATH" command.

After executing the command, restart the terminal for the new $PATH value to take effect. You'll be able to simply type 'code .' in any folder to start editing files in that folder. The "." Simply means "current directory"

(Source: Visual Studio Code documentation)

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Note: If you're running a build based off the OSS repository, you will need to run code-oss . (Dzeimsas Zvirblis' comment)

Answer 2

If you want to add it permanently:

Add this to your ~/.bash_profile, or to ~/.zshrc if you are running macOS v10.15 (Catalina) or later.

export PATH="$PATH:/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/bin"

Source: Visual Studio Code on macOS

Answer 3

Open the ~/.bashrc file using vi or Vim:

vi ~/.bashrc

Enter the following by pressing i to insert:

code () { VSCODE_CWD="$PWD" open -n -b "com.microsoft.VSCode" --args $* ;}

Save the file using :wq

Reflect the settings in ~/.bashrc using the following command:

source ~/.bashrc