How do I disable tabs in Visual Studio Code?

Question

With the new version of Visual Studio Code, tabs are rendered by default. How do I disable / hide them as I really liked the previous behavior without any tabs?

Dalury

Answer 1

Editor Tabs make their appearance starting with Visual Studio Code version 1.3 (June 2016) and are enabled by default. To disable editor tabs:

1. Open Visual Studio Code User Settings (Preferences → User Settings). This will open two side-by-side documents.
2. Add a new "workbench.editor.showTabs": "single", entry (if this is the last entry, omit the trailing comma).
3. Save the User Settings file.

Jamestown

To fully implement the previous behaviour: In addition to the above setting, set workbench.editor.enablePreview to false and explorer.openEditors.visible to 0. This leaves you with a single editor window; Ctrl+Tab displays the recently opened filse list; and the now redundant Explorer OPEN EDITORS pane is hidden. I find this behaviour more focused and easier to use than a bunch of Tabs. – Portwine

You can find more help in the migration issue: github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/6605 – Jamestown

there is no User settings in Preference!!! i am using VS mac 7.3.3. any help is appreciated – Fiorin

Makes you wonder why they didn't make this part of View menu toggle white space or control characters. Or at least make this a menu item as it's quite core to the interface. – Bettencourt

Now it's "workbench.editor.showTabs": "none". – Arbe

Answer 2

Visual Studio Code v1.27+ now includes a GUI for editing settings:

1. Open menu File → Preferences → Settings.
2. Choose User Settings to apply everywhere (or Workspace Settings to turn off tabs on just this workspace).
3. Choose Workbench → Editor Management on the left, and then scroll down to Show Tabs and uncheck.

Alternatively, you could just pop into Zen Mode, which has tabs hidden by default.

Ruthful

Answer 3

You can use the plugin "Custom CSS & JS" and use the following code

.title.show-file-icons {
    display: none !important;
}

Venable