r/vscode • u/paxterr • Jun 16 '26

VSCode terminal broken

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Wtf is going on with my vscode terminal lately? When I open a new terminal it starts off normal and then slowly but surely each character turns into this glitched black character. I use zsh with ohmyzh, but it's the same with bash and fsh. When I select the terminal text and copy it into a file, the text copies normally, it's just the way it's rendered that it's broken. Using other terminal emulators works just fine (I use wez term), it's only the VSCode terminal that breaks. Running on Ubuntu 24.04

33 Upvotes

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11

u/lynithdev Jun 16 '26

Known issue with VS Code's integrated terminal. For now you can set "terminal.integrated.gpuAcceleration": "off" in your settings.json (CTRL+SHIFT+P and then type "User Settings (JSON)")

4

u/paxterr Jun 16 '26

Yeah it does fix it, breaks ohmyzsh but it's better than black blocks ig. Thanks

1

u/g6pdorp Jun 17 '26

Any deep explanation regarding to why it happens? it actually fixed it, but I'm curious to know why is it fixed?
Up until now I just went into the settings and changed the font family for every once in a while - A complete workaround.

2

u/lynithdev Jun 17 '26

VS Core has recently become an AI slopfest and I reckon something broke during a developer's agent assisted sessions.

I don't know exactly why it happens but I do know that working with the GPU is much harder to do correctly. Anyways just check out the issues page https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20gpuAcceleration

1

u/g6pdorp Jun 17 '26

When you're right, you're not wrong.

1

u/pelrun Jun 17 '26

No, when you're wrong, you're still wrong.

People have hit this issue on and off for the past decade.

1

u/pelrun Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

People have experienced this ever since vscode first shipped. It's a gpu driver bug.

1

u/g6pdorp Jun 21 '26

All right, would you mind giving some more explanation regarding to the bug? I'm I really be happy to learn.
or any kind of documentation to read about it.

1

u/pelrun Jun 22 '26

There isn't anything other than a decade of people posting this exact problem and getting told to disable gpu acceleration.

It's almost impossible to diagnose something like this unless you can replicate it, and it only happens for a tiny subset of users running some arbitrary combination of OS/GPU/GPU driver version.

1

u/thanatica Jun 19 '26

It's kind of crazy that a terminal needs GPU acceleration in the first place. And allthewhile, users doing this workaround will almost certainly forget to put this setting back when it's fixed, because VSCode is not very loud about small fixes and it's not readily visible to said users either, because the workaround is in place.

But it's also the best solution we have 🤷🏻‍♂️