Studio by WordPress.com is a free local development tool designed to help developers build plugins, themes, and full WordPress sites. The recent 1.5.1 release introduces more flexible environment customization, including support for setting your preferred code editor and terminal application directly in Studio.
This has been one of our most requested features, especially with tools like Cursor becoming more popular. The new Preferences interface lays the groundwork for supporting even more tools over time.
How to configure your preferences
To set your preferred code editor and terminal, open the Settings modal. Click “Howdy, [your name]” or “WordPress.com login” if you’re not signed in.
Select the Preferences tab in the modal window. From there, you can choose your preferred code editor and terminal application.
The following options are currently supported:
Code editors:
- Visual Studio Code
- Cursor
- Windsurf
- PHPStorm
- WebStorm
Terminal applications:
- Terminal (Mac)
- Command Prompt (Windows)
- Warp
- Ghostty (Mac)
- iTerm2 (Mac)
Note: To appear as selectable options in your Studio Preferences, the applications must be installed on your computer. On macOS, they need to be in /Applications or /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Applications.
Once you have made your selections, click Save. You can change your preferences at any time.
Once saved, the buttons on each site’s Overview tab will update to match your chosen tools. Here, you can see the user has configured the Terminal app on Mac and Cursor.
What’s next for Studio?
We’re actively improving Studio to make it the best local WordPress development tool. Here are a few updates coming in the future:
- Integration with Pressable: Sync and deploy full sites to Pressable-hosted websites.
- An enhanced command-line interface (CLI): Studio will better support streamlined development workflows.
You can track progress, preview upcoming features, and make your own requests in the Studio GitHub repository.
Studio is just over a year old, and 2025 will be an important year for the open source project. If you haven’t recently used Studio, now is a great time to download the latest version for free and explore new features like Studio Assistant and Studio Sync.
If you’re interested in contributing to Studio, perhaps by adding support for additional code editors or terminal applications, we would love to see your contributions in the GitHub repository.
