Opening a file through the command line drops windows with no unsaved files

[tomzx]

• VSCode Version: 1.25.0.
• OS Version: Windows

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Run code from the command line
2. Open a few windows with different workspaces and no edited files
3. Have the "window.restoreWindows": "all" setting so that on restart, all windows should open
4. Exit code
5. Run code from the command line again
6. Observe that all the previous windows are opened
7. Exit code
8. Run code but pass a file as argument
9. Observe that code only opened a window for this file and that all previous windows are not restored. Also observe that exiting code and running it again with no argument results in the previous windows not being restored.

Might be related to #36964.

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes

[phuze]

Yes, this is a bug -- unfortunately, I don't think Microsoft feels that way.

#15949 (comment)

When you instruct Code to explicitly open on a resource (file or folder), we do not restore the windows.

See other issues:

#15949
#50846

[tomzx]

@purplekrayons Thanks for pointing out this has already been reported.

I guess the best we could do is suggest approaches that would make it possible for us to be happy without breaking existing behavior, such as adding a new command line option --restore-session, or maybe discuss about the idea of windows sessions?

Windows sessions would be a set of windows you can save the state into a file and have restored, very similar to workspaces, but at the windows level. With sessions, running code . would open a new unsaved session with only the folder you opened, even if you have another session with multiple windows and modified files in them. By default I would expect code . to use the "default session", which would be the last state when code was closed (and the state which would be restored if you run code without argument). You could pass something like code . --new-session to start a new session with only the specified path being opened, which could be useful for quick editing.

Obviously the best would be to have full control over how sessions get restored. You should be able to configure it so that by default it either restores everything, or nothing. You should also be able to override this when launching the command line, so that opening a path from explorer/finder/cmd/terminal would either only open this single path or open this path and restore all your previous windows.

I can tell my idea of windows sessions is definitely not polished, but it might be a starting point for further discussion on how to solve this so that both the existing behavior and our desired behavior can be achieved.

[vscodebot]

Thanks for creating this issue! We figured it's covering the same as another one we already have. Thus, we closed this one as a duplicate. You can search for existing issues here. See also our issue reporting guidelines.

Happy Coding!