Document usage as the Terminal within JetBrains IDEs - "Process Terminal local Is Running" error
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- CSS
- Stars
- 3.3k
- Forks
- 446
- Avg merge
- 2h 16m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 1
Description
So I'm trying to use MSYS as my terminal within IntelliJ, PyCharm and CLion, and thought I would open this issue here in case anyone else has similar difficulties:
I started off copying the command documented here for Windows Terminal: https://www.msys2.org/docs/terminals/, i.e. invoking msys2_shell.cmd.

This does work, however it leads to an incorrect warning when closing the terminal, the IDE incorrectly thinks that 'Process
Terminal local Is Running' when it is not:

I'm 99% certain the reason for this (after doing some testing) is because the IDE is looking to see if the terminal process has any child processes running. So it thinks msys2_shell.cmd is the terminal process, and that bash.exe is an active child process:

I was able to work around this by setting the ide to invoke "C:\msys64\usr\bin\bash.exe" --login directly:

However this requires manually setting all the environment variables that would have been applied by the msys2_shell.cmd script.
Unfortunately the JetBrains Terminal environment variables are scoped locally to the individual project, there is no way to set them globally - so I have had to set them at the Windows level - which isn't ideal :(

I now have MSYS working as my terminal in CLion/IntelliJ, and it correctly detects if there is a process running or not when closing the terminal tab.
Contributor guide
No contributing guide indexed for this repository
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start with the existing MSYS2 terminal documentation at https://www.msys2.org/docs/terminals/ and the reported JetBrains IDE workflow using msys2_shell.cmd or bash.exe --login. Document the environment setup and the workaround for avoiding the incorrect running-process warning; done when JetBrains users can configure the terminal without relying on undocumented Windows-level variables.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- bash
- Domain
- documentation
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Difficulty
- 2/5
- Estimated time
- 1-3 hours
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 45/100