I would much rather double-click to open file, and prevent single-click previews. How do we do that in vs code?
10 Answers
From vscode 1.20:
"workbench.list.openMode": "doubleClick",
6 Comments
jmcgrory
I had to fight through a barrage of people answering the wrong question (funnily enough trying to disable preview mode by enabling a more permanent mode actually makes the issue more annoying!) to get to this, thank you @Alex
Ares9323
I had the exact problem of @jmcgrory, this shoul be marked as solution
JNAK
This is wrong. The preview function remains working.
jmcgrory
It's been 3 years and I've just come back from the same issue on a new machine, tried the first (wrong) answer then looked further down and seen that I've not only upvoted but commented. Those that repeat history @Ares9323 ...
David Waterworth
I just came back to it on an old machine that managed to revert to this behavior in a recent update.
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The only way to disable file previewing when clicked on at all is by setting "workbench.editor.enablePreview" to false.
"workbench.editor.enablePreview": false,
answered Oct 25, 2017 at 18:41
Michael J. Calkins
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5 Comments
phifi
This does NOT change the behaviour, that the file only gets opened in a tab when double clicked. The only difference is, that it gets opened in "edit mode" rather than in "preview mode".
Michael J. Calkins
That's how you disable file previewing and open the file. VS Code can't do the double click thing.
Armin
@MichaelJ.Calkins has the correct answer to this issue. This should be marked as correct.
Yuki
this is for older version, please look at the top answer
Iain Samuel McLean Elder
This also also works for opening files with CTRL+P.
Go to File->Preferences->Settings, search for the following and disable it:
"workbench.editor.enablePreview": false
2 Comments
Tony
Making this change will cause single-clicks to open (rather than preview) files. If you want to disable all single-click actions, use Alex's suggestion.
JNAK
This is the wrong answer. This will open the files on single click. OP and myself wants to disable single click preview and single click file opens. It should be single click selects the file and double click opens it. The issue is that clicking a file in the explorer window opens a preview causing you to lose focus on the document that you want to keep open. Your suggestion to remove previews actually causes automatic file opening, which is a worse disruptive behaviour.
The necessary settings to prevent single-click in the Explorer view opening a file at all are in the previous answers to this question but you need to apply two of them:
"workbench.editor.enablePreview": false
That will change single-click in the explorer to fully open the file instead of opening it in preview (italics) mode. Arguably this is worse than before unless you're on a touchscreen device so you also need the following setting:
"workbench.list.openMode": "doubleClick"
Now you have to double-click on a file in Explorer to open it and preview is off. Finally, I had to restart all open instances of vscode for the doubleClick change to take effect.
vscode is a moving target so I should point out this was tested in version 1.45.1.
2 Comments
Juan Treminio
This should be marked as the answer.
enablePreview is not what you want to change. Solution tested and works on Cursor as of late 2025.Juan Treminio
To apply the same behavior to directories, you want to look at
workbench.tree.expandMode.Probably you're mixing the terms. I guess you are talking about "Peek" feature:
And here is how you can disable it:
"editor.gotoLocation.multipleDefinitions": "goto"
Also, there is a "Preview editor" feature:
That could be disabled by:
"workbench.editor.enablePreview": false
2 Comments
foureyedraven
for me, definitely what I was looking for - thank you
abdalmonem
Spent last 30 minutes searching for this under a wrong term , thanks man.
As far as I know there is no way to do this right now (version 1.12).
Many people "requested" this feature, just look at this GitHub issue.
.. and a relatively new comment about the issue:
Sorry, didn't have much time to look into this again. As it stands right now we need to clean up some debt first in the area of tree usage throughout our code before we can ask for a PR again.
3 Comments
phifi
That behaviour really annoys me - thanks for the link to the issue though.
JNAK
Thanks for the link, the issue was closed. 3 year later this issue is still not resolved.
Dávid Molnár
Look at the openMode option!
So I had to do both suggestions by @Alex and @MichaelJ.Calkins. More specifically I had to configure the open mode setting to click and enable preview to true. That way I can preview with a single click and actually keep it open with a double click. Below are the settings that were configured.
"workbench.list.openMode": "singleClick",
"workbench.editor.enablePreview": true,
1 Comment
caravana_942
I don't know why this is not the default in VSCode. Thank you very much!
Go to visual studio code settings on the bottom left and then search for 'preview' settings. Make sure that 'enable preview' is not enabled in 'WorkBench > Editor'
Comments
Here is how to set this from UI level if you do not want to edit files directly: File -> Preferences -> Workbench -> List: Open mode = 'doubleClick'
or
File -> Preferences -> search for 'Open mode' and set it to 'doubleClick'
Comments
Another configuration entry (above the "workbench.editor.enablePreview": true) that can prevent VSCode from opening files on new tab is the following:
"workbench.editor.showTabs": false
Make sure it is removed from settings.json or it is set to true.
1 Comment
mr-possible
Thanks for this, The 'preview' feature is garbage according to me.
"workbench.editor.enablePreview": false, but you could not prevent single-click, which means single-click will open file for editing directly rather than preview.workbench.action.keepeditorwhich is⌘K, Enterby default (being buried it's a Sublime Text throwback)