How to stop VS Code from opening the Panel automatically upon startup?

Question

Whenever I launch VSCode (either using the terminal or desktop icon) on my Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it automatically opens the Panel at the bottom:

How do I stop that? Of course, I can manually close that every time I open the VSCode. But that's kind of annoying. So, I was wondering if there are any options in the settings.

Answer 1

In the settings, you can search for Auto Open Output Window On Restore and set the value to false if it isn't already. ctrl + , on Windows, or command + , on Mac

Answer 2

It remembers what panel was open the last time you closed that workspace folder / VS Code and restores that workbench state when reopening the workspace folder. As far as I know, at the time of this writing, there's no built-in way to disable this.

The one exception I know of is the terminal panel, which has the terminal.integrated.hideOnStartup setting.

In general, that state is stored in the state database for that workspace folder (which is stored in the user-data directory at ./User/workspaceStorage/<workspace-hash>/state.vscdb). It's an SQLite database, and the specific entry storing it is workbench.panel.hidden (see also workbench.panelpart.activepanelid). So there are technically things you can do to automate flipping that, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. If you want a setting that controls this, then you can raise a feature-request issue ticket. Some of the related code is in src/vs/workbench/browser/layout.ts.