What is the Flutter Console?

Question

As I am following the 'Get Started' documentation on Flutter for Windows, out of nowhere, there is a reference to the 'Flutter Console':

You are now ready to run Flutter commands in the Flutter Console!

Later the documentation request you to ...

In the Flutter Console, run the following command to see if there are any dependencies you need to install to complete the setup:

$ flutter doctor

What is this magical 'Flutter Console'?

Earlier, they describe Flutter depends on PowerShell 5.0; is PowerShell the Flutter Console?

The documentation lists an optional step to add the flutter 'bin' folder to PATH environment variables "[i]f you wish to run Flutter commands in the regular Windows command prompt". This does not seem optional to me, as running flutter doctor is not recognized in PowerShell (which for the time being I will assume is the Flutter Console). I did run flutter.bat, but this window closed after some time. Perhaps this was supposed to be the Flutter Console?

Did I miss something in the setup?

Answer 1

flutter_console.bat is located in the root of your Flutter folder and not in the sub-folder called bin, e.g. ..\flutter\flutter_console.bat and ..\flutter\bin\flutter.bat are the files you have mistaken. You checked the bin folder. Here is a screenshot of the Flutter Console.

The image should explain what it does, it allows you to access flutter commands, which are calling the flutter.bat. That is the reason why you cannot interact with the latter when double-clicking it because you are not sending any parameters and it is not configured as a console window, i.e. it does not pause and wait for more input.

The Flutter Console just lets you execute commands in the right directory if you have not added it to PATH because if you have ..\flutter\bin\ in PATH you can access the flutter commands from anywhere.

Answer 2

The Flutter Console is a specific terminal window shipped with the Flutter installation bundle for windows.

It is installed when the bundle .zip is extracted.

As the installation page says, you can locate the file flutter_console.bat inside the flutter directory and you can start it by double-clicking.