Clear opened file history.

[vipapikyan-cyber]

I have a Theia Electron application, and each time I start it, the previously opened files are automatically restored in the main editor area. How can I clear this history so that no files are opened from the previous session on new startup?

[msujew]

Hey @vipapikyan-cyber,

Widgets that can be stored/restored upon application startup usually implement the StatefulWidget interface.

I believe should be able to override the functions externally (or remove them completely) to ensure that they are not longer respected by the shell restorer.

EditorWidget.prototype.storeState = () => undefined;
EditorWidget.prototype.restoreState = () => { };

[sdirix]

Hi @vipapikyan-cyber,

@msujew mentioned how you can influence the store/restore of specific widgets.

There are also more generic mechanisms available:

You can rebind the ShellLayoutRestorer which is responsible to store and load layouts and simply not store or load anything. In that case your application will always start with the default layout.

For more fine-grained customization you can bind a ShellLayoutTransformer in which you can generically modify a loaded layout before it is applied and for example remove all editors but keep the rest.

[vipapikyan-cyber]

Hi @msujew, hi @sdirix.
Thanks for the suggestions.
I tried the following:
EditorWidget.prototype.storeState = () => undefined;
EditorWidget.prototype.restoreState = () => {};

I also looked into customizing ShellLayoutRestorer, but this closed all widgets, I only want to close previously opened files, not everything((like Messages, etc.). I’m using Theia 1.62.2, and this version doesn’t have ShellLayoutTransformer, so I’m trying to find a way to clear only the opened files during startup.
Any ideas on how to do that in 1.62.2?

[VilikNakhshikyan]

Hi,
I’m experiencing the same issue on Theia 1.46.1.
I want to prevent previously opened files from being restored on startup, but keep other widgets intact. Since this version doesn’t include ShellLayoutTransformer, I haven't found a clean way to handle this without affecting other widgets.