Disable panel on Codespace creation / UI layout on startup

[gihanmarasingha]

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I'm using Codespaces to teach matheamtics undergraduates, many of whom have no need of the Terminal. When opening Codespaces in the browser, a large panel pops up with the mesage Welcome to Codespaces! "You are on a custom image defined in your devcontainer.json file." in the terminal.

Of course, I can always ask the students to close the panel, but I'd like to make things as simple as possible for them.

Is there some setting, maybe in devcontainer.json that will prevent the panel from opening when the codespace is created?

More generally, is there a way to configure the UI layout on codespace creation? For example, with three vertical editors and no panel.

[jdevfullstack]

you are using a template, right ? where did you get that ? you can ask those users

[gihanmarasingha]

Thanks. I'm not sure what you mean by a template or those users. If you mean a template repository, then no. This is my own repo.

[gihanmarasingha]

I've found a solution to my first problem: I see there's an extension that automatically hides the panel when vscode opens. It does this by running the workbench.action.closePanel vscode command. I've added the extension to my devcontainer.json, which does the trick.

This makes me wonder if it's possible to run vscode commands on startup through a setting in devcontainer.json. That way, I wouldn't need to install an extension.

[erikaellr]

Hi @gihanmarasingha, we're thrilled you're using Codespaces!

As you saw in the extension you found, you can programmatically execute VSCode commands from extensions, but there isn't a way to do so directly from a devcontainer.json lifecycle script - it lacks the execution context that extensions have of running within VSCode itself and having access to those APIs.

But the extension you found looks like it may be a good fit for getting the behavior you want, nice find!

[gihanmarasingha]

Thanks for letting me know!

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