Skip to content

Add setting to hide Source Control commit input box (scm.showInputBox) #281562

@kgn

Description

@kgn

Add a user-facing setting to hide the commit message input box in the Source Control panel.

Use Case

When using VS Code with multiple repositories in a workspace, the Source Control panel displays a commit input box for each repository. For users who:

  • Prefer committing via terminal/CLI (e.g., using Claude Code, git CLI, or other tools)
  • Want a cleaner, more compact Source Control view
  • Only use the panel to view changed files, not to commit

The input boxes take up significant vertical space (34px per repository) and cannot currently be hidden.

Current Workarounds

  • scm.inputMinLineCount: 1 and scm.inputMaxLineCount: 1 reduce height but don't hide the box
  • CSS injection via extensions can hide the content but cannot collapse the gap due to VS Code's virtualized list using JavaScript-calculated inline styles for row positioning
  • The SourceControlInputBox.visible property exists in the API but is only accessible to SCM provider extensions, not end users

Proposed Solution

Add a setting like:

"scm.showInputBox": false

Or per-provider:

"git.showInputBox": false

This would:

  1. Hide the input box rows in the Source Control panel
  2. Collapse the space they occupy (update the virtualized list to skip these rows)
  3. Still allow commits via command palette, terminal, or other means

Additional Context

System Info

  • VS Code Version: 1.106.3 (latest stable)
  • OS: Linux (Arch)

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

No labels
No labels

Type

No type

Projects

No projects

Milestone

No milestone

Relationships

None yet

Development

No branches or pull requests

Issue actions