This page describes how to use the Cloud Shell Terminal.
Use the terminal
Cloud Shell provides command-line access to the virtual machine instance in a terminal window that opens in the Google Cloud console. You can open multiple shell connections to the same instance.
To view the gcloud CLI available commands, run gcloud --help
.
In addition to accessing the Google Cloud CLI and other
utilities from the command line, you can use the cloudshell
command to launch
tutorials, open the Cloud Shell Editor, and download files.
For more information, run cloudshell help
.
Scroll the display
In addition to using your mouse while browser focus is on a session tab, you can
scroll by pressing Ctrl
+Shift
+PageUp
/ Ctrl
+Shift
+PageDn
(Windows and Linux) or Fn
+Shift
+Up
/ Fn
+Shift
+Down
(on Mac OS X).
Copy and paste text
To copy and paste text:
Select some text in the session display or another window using your mouse.
To copy the text, press
Ctrl
+C
(on Windows or Linux) orCmd
+C
(on macOS).To paste at your cursor location, press
Ctrl
+V
(on Windows or Linux) orCmd
+V
(on macOS).
Send a key combination using the Google Cloud console
Click
Send Key Combination and then press Ctrl
+V
.
Configure terminal settings
To adjust your terminal settings, click Settings. In this menu, you can set your Terminal preferences for theme, font type and size, and copy, keyboard and scrollbar default settings.
Keyboard layout support
If you're using an international keyboard or would like to customize your key bindings, Cloud Shell allows you to specify which key behaves as Alt Gr (your modifier key). To specify key mapping, go to the Terminal Settings menu, select Terminal Preferences > Keyboard > Alt Gr Key and choose one of the following options:
- Auto - Autodetect based on browser language
- None - Disable any AltGr related munging
- Ctrl-Alt - Set Ctrl+Alt as AltGr
- Left-Alt - Set left Alt as AltGr
- Right-Alt - Set right Alt as AltGr
Additionally, you can set 'Alt is meta' to specify that your alt key should behave as a meta key.
Open multiple terminal sessions
To open additional sessions, click Add Cloud Shell Session at the top of the Cloud Shell window. Each session connects to the same virtual machine instance. When you open a new session, it appears in a new tab at the bottom of the Google Cloud console.
Tab title customization
Cloud Shell understands xterm escape sequences for
setting tab titles. To rename
a tab title, set the PS1
environment variable in your .bashrc to your
desired configuration and source your .bashrc for the change to take.