When you open Visual Studio Code without doing something like opening a .workspace file or dragging a folder onto it, you get a fairly blank screen like this:
RECORD SCRATCH. I’m an idiot. It was just like that because I had my “Work Bench” set to “none” instead of the default.
Putting the value back to welcomePage I get recent projects:
Maybe I turned it off as it was a bit busy, but whatever it’s not that bad. Still a bit interesting to compare how the others do it. I’ll leave the rest of the post alone.
Speaking for myself, there is about a 95% chance what I want to do is open a recent project. I’ve got good muscle memory for Command-Shift-P to open commands and usually “File: Open Recent…” is among the top choices as I do it a a lot, and I’m good to go. Although I see Control-R is a direct command for that they are trying to teach me.
What I find more interesting as I explored VS Code forks is that all of them I tried implemented a different UI for opening a recent project.
I redacted the actual project names below because you goofballs don’t need to know all my kick ass secret projects.
To me it’s starting to be weird now VS Code doesn’t do this. It’s cool — you can copy back.
Hey Chris,
VSCode actually does have a welcome screen.
You can find it via the menubar: Help › Welcome.
There’s a checkbox at the bottom to always show the page at startup.
I have that disabled too. Hope this helps :)
Even Visual Studio Code’s default is different, from what I remember. It will display the Welcome page, including a a list of recent folders, if not explicitly disabled by the user.
I would not mind the “empty page” to be a somewhat configurable dashboard for common commands, recent projects, access to the last few release notes, notifications, list of updates and such, even though I will most often just select some project.