VSCode: How to turn off auto select in File Explorer when changing window tabs?

Question

In VSCode, if I have an editor window tab open and I click anywhere in that editor window, the selected file in the File Explorer changes to the file being edited. I would like to prevent that behavior. This is possible in Visual Studio, but I can't seem to find a similar setting in the preferences file of VSCode.

Can anyone provide some suggestions?

score 64 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 07 '17 at 19:10

64

This has been added, see https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/14745.

Configuration is "explorer.autoReveal": false

answered Sep 07 '17 at 19:10

alalonde

1,823
1
16
27

3

This should be the accepted answer – Pier Feb 15 '22 at 00:48

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:54

You can't, at least not today. The only thing you can do, is keeping the scroll position when switching tabs. See this answer for the setting: VSCode prevent file Explorer from jumping

And here is the feature request on Github: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/14745

(Feel free to add a "Thumbs Up" via Github Reaction at the top so the request gets more attention in the future, this increases the chances that it gets implemented sooner)

VSCode: How to turn off auto select in File Explorer when changing window tabs?

2 Answers2