The Five Ways to Run Claude Code
An exclusive resource for students of Arun's Claude Code Course.
Three sections in, every single thing you have watched has happened inside a dark window full of small text, so it would be fair to have concluded that the terminal is Claude Code. It is one place you can run it, and there are several others, with the same tool sitting underneath every one.
Your setup travels with you. The instructions file for your project, the permission rules you write, the skills and the outside tools you connect, all of it loads the same way no matter which one you open. So all you are choosing here is where you sit while you work. There is no second tool underneath it.
The five front doors
1. The terminal
Where you have been all along. You type claude inside a folder and the whole conversation happens as text. Nothing to download, because you already installed it.
2. The desktop app
Download it, open it like any other program, and your project sits inside a window. It costs nothing to download, and Claude Code inside it needs the same paid plan you set up when you first installed. It brings its own copy of Claude Code along with it, so there is nothing separate to install.
- https://claude.ai/download
3. The extension for Visual Studio Code
Puts Claude in a panel right beside your code. The same extension installs into Cursor. You can also install it from the Extensions panel inside the editor by searching for Claude Code.
- https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anthropic.claude-code
4. The plugin for the JetBrains editors
The family that includes IntelliJ, PyCharm and WebStorm. Install it from the IDE's own plugin marketplace. This page walks through the setup for each editor.
- https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/ide-integrations
5. The browser
Needs nothing installed at all. It runs on Anthropic's machines rather than your own, and the same thing is waiting in the Claude app on your phone.
- https://claude.ai/code
One honest note, worth seeing on the page
Anthropic lists Visual Studio Code and the JetBrains editors as the supported ones.
- https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/overview
There are other editors built on the same foundation as Visual Studio Code. Windsurf and Antigravity are the two you are most likely to run into, and the extension will usually install into those from their own extensions panel. People work that way every day. They are not on that supported list, though, so treat them as something that works rather than something you have been promised.
Which door do you use
Each one is genuinely better at something different, and that is the useful way to choose between them.
The terminal earns its place the moment you want Claude to do one job and hand the answer straight to another program. You send a single instruction and get the finished answer back, with no conversation happening anywhere in between. It is the one thing the other doors cannot do at all. It is also extremely light, so you can have several conversations running at once and the machine barely notices.
An editor extension earns its place for a completely different reason. If you already spend your whole day inside that editor, then another window in your life is a cost rather than a feature.
The desktop app earns its place because everything Claude changed in your project so far arrived as text that scrolled past you. In the app you look at a change before it happens, old version beside new, with an accept and a reject. Nothing moves on your disk until you decide. Your conversations also sit in a list down the side, so you can shut the machine down and come back tomorrow to find them waiting.
The trade is honest. The app is not light. A couple of sessions will slow a laptop down, and there are days when one is enough to do it. What you get back is a window big enough to work in comfortably, and text that is easier on the eyes across a long session than it sounds like it should be.
One more thing, which is a way into a door you have already opened
A session running on your machine can be switched on for remote control, and then you can steer it from a browser or from your phone, from anywhere you happen to be. Claude is still running on your computer, on your files. The phone is a window looking into that machine, not a place of its own, which does mean your computer has to stay on and stay awake.
See Where You Stand
This resource is one piece of a much bigger system.
Take the free Claude Code Readiness Quiz. It is 15 short situations, scored out of 100, and it tests how you handle a job rather than what you know about a tool, so you can take it without ever having opened Claude Code.
Take the Claude Code Readiness Quiz →15 situations · Scored out of 100 · Free