Ionide-vscode-fsharp: Sidebar explorer opens on VSCode start with ionide fsharp

[Agaspher20]

After installing Ionide-fsharp extension VS Code starts to open sidebar explorer on startup.

Reproduction steps:

1. Install Ionide-fsharp and reload VS Code to run it.
2. Open folder in VS Code. Folder have to contain at least one *.fs file. In my case I have empty "myfile.fs" file in folder.
3. Collapse sidebar (Ctrl+B in default keyboard preferences)
4. Close VS Code
5. Open VS Code
6. In status bar you can see the following message from "Ionide-fsharp" extension: "Loading all projects". You could check that message from "Ionide-fsharp" by hovering mouse over that message in status bar.
7. VS Code opens and focuses sidebar explorer (like you clicked Ctrl+Shift+E).

If you disable or uninstall "Ionide-fsharp" extension this behavior stops reproducing.
I tried to reinstall this extension but it didn't help.

VSCode info:

Version: 1.31.1 (system setup)
Commit: 1b8e8302e405050205e69b59abb3559592bb9e60
Date: 2019-02-12T02:20:54.427Z
Electron: 3.1.2
Chrome: 66.0.3359.181
Node.js: 10.2.0
V8: 6.6.346.32
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.17763

Ionide-fsharp version: 3.33.0

[MangelMaxime]

This is a duplicate of https://github.com/ionide/ionide-vscode-fsharp/issues/990

You can disable this behavior by setting FSharp.showExplorerOnStartup to false.

[Agaspher20]

Thank you so much for your such a quick response.

I found that default extension setting is FSharp.showExplorerOnStartup: true. And with this setting it opens "F# Solution Explorer" or "Explorer" depending on types of files it found in opened folder.

Probably it would be better to set this setting to the false by default. Probably its something personal, but I don't like this behavior at all, _especially because it steals focus from text area_ and it happens after extension analysed and loaded solutions to explore (From 2 to 10 seconds in my case). During this time I could start editing file.

For small displays (on laptops) this behavior leads to significant and unexpected reduction of text area size.

Thank you for your great work on this extension.
Best regards.

[MangelMaxime]

Quoting the author of the plugin :) :

FSharp.showExplorerOnStartup set to true by default is by-design. We had way too many people not knowing about Solution Explorer.

But yes, I’d be happy to see improvements, however from top of my head I’m not sure if there is API that will let us detect if the activity bar icon is hidden

[Krzysztof-Cieslak]

Closing the issue as duplicate. Feel free to comment on the #990