how to stop a command in the VS Code terminal

You can terminate with the Trash icon like you do, or press Control + C. That's the shortcut from the default Terminal app and it also works in VS Code.

Hope this helps! ✌

In certain cases, such as running a Node server, Ctrl-C wouldn't work. Instead, you can stop the app or command by pressing Ctrl+Alt+M (i.e. Ctrl+Option+M for mac users).

Sample JavaScript code to demonstrate this:

const http = require('http');

http.createServer((req, res) => {
    res.write('Hello, world!');
    res.end();
}).listen(5000, () => console.log('Server running...'));

ctrl + c works in terminal but didn't work for me in vs code. However hitting q did ( when running a git diff for example)