Integrated Terminal Shortcut in VS Code Opens External Terminal

For quite a while I’ve been slightly annoyed by the behaviour that the keyboard shortcut in Visual Studio Code didn’t open the integrated terminal if I also had an external terminal open, it was switching to that one instead.

Googling the problem didn’t help me come closer to an explanation, which I suspected had to do with the language/keyboard specific nature of this issue. As you can see in the image below, the default keyboard shortcut to open the integrated terminal on my machine is Ctrl + ö.

Now when I was in the process of setting up oh-my-posh in ConEmu and playing with Quake style, I found an explanation. ConEmu/Cmder uses the same keyboard shortcut for Minimize/Restore as VS Code does for its integrated terminal. Since ConEmu listens for this shortcut even when the program isn’t active (in focus), it overrides the shortcut in VS Code.

Changing the shortcut in ConEmu solves the problem. One annoyance less 😊