A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in Visual Studio Code…they make presenting (and generally working) in Visual Studio Code really smooth.

But one thing that kinda bugs me is the location of the terminal…I’ve always had it at the bottom, which is generally fine, and I know you can move it around (top, right, left)…however I’ve found that when presenting, space is at a premium. I bump up the font size and this can result in a lot of scrolling through results in the terminal, which ain’t great.

But what if we could have a similar setup to how Paul Randal has his SQL Server Management Studio configured.

What I mean is, can we have a powershell terminal as a tab next to the editor? This would be great when running scripts with a large output, no more scrolling!

Here’s how it looks in SQL Server Management Studio: –

So let’s make VS Code open a powershell terminal in a separate tab. Add this to settings.json: –

"terminal.integrated.defaultLocation": "editor"

And let’s make the highlighting yellow: –

"workbench.colorCustomizations": {
"editor.selectionBackground": "#fff59d",
"editor.selectionHighlightBackground": "#fff59d80",
"editor.wordHighlightBackground": "#fff59d66",
"editor.wordHighlightStrongBackground": "#fff17699"
},

Here’s what VS Code looks like now: –

OK, I’ll bet loads of people know about this but hey, hope this helps someone out there…I think it looks really good!

Combining this with the key mappings and ZoomIt (Ctrl+2 call outs) allows me to present code clearly and smoothly…no more waving the mouse around 🙂

Oh and remember…when presenting, don’t use dark mode 😀

Thanks for reading!