Connection to the terminal's pty host process is unresponsive

Question

After installing VSCode, I started receiving this certain notification saying

The connection to the terminal's pty host process is unresponsive, the terminals may stop working.

The notification won't disappear until I click the restart button. But despite clicking this, no changes occurs and the notification pops up again after few seconds.

This problem caused my terminal to stop working and running node applications impossible.

Answer 1

I had this happen when using the Remote SSH extension and VS Code 1.92.0. Restarting as suggested in other answers didn't fix it for me.

To fix it I SSHed into the machine from another terminal and deleted the local .vscode-server directory.

ssh me@host 
rm -rf .vscode-server

Then restarted VS Code and it reinstalled the server components and everything is working again as expected.

Answer 2

I realized a silly mistake causing this error message for me.

If I do this:

code .

The integrated terminal doesn't work.

If I do this:

code . &

The integrated terminal works.

Answer 3

Simply Kill the terminal and wait a minute. In my case it's working perfectly in MacOS :)

Answer 4

I just encountered the same issue in 1.79.2 (windows 10) Just closed all the windows in VSC and could launch a new terminal

Answer 5

This is how I solved the issue:

• Press Ctrl + Shift + P (or Cmd + Shift + P on macOS) to open the command palette.
• Type "Reload Window" and select the "Developer: Reload Window" option. This will reload the Visual Studio Code window.
• Once the window is reloaded, open a new terminal by clicking on the plus icon in the terminal panel or using the shortcut Ctrl + ` (backtick).

After this, my terminal started working normally.

Answer 6

same problem with 1.79 - downgrading to former version makes wsl extension imcompatible, gradle java applications stopped working on wsl - not sure if this is related

Answer 7

Look up the extension "Dev Container" -> uninstall it -> reload VS Code-> reinstall the extension.

Hope this fixes it for you as well.

Answer 8

Same problem using version 1.79. Solved by downgrading the version.

Answer 9

This is known issue https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release/issues/7964

The fix will be included in the next 1.76 stable release, that is expected to be released in the first week of March 2023.

In the meantime you could either switch to the insiders builds or revert to the 1.74.3 version.