I want to disable/enable / show/hide the Command Center in VS Code (that thing in the top bar with the back and forward buttons and the search box), or just certain parts of it, such as the search bar part (where one can use the command palette, search for files, etc.) or the navigation buttons. How can I do that?
To change whether the whole Command Center is enabled or not, use the window.commandCenter setting. Note that if you want to enable it, the window.titleBarStyle setting must be set to "custom". You can also right click any other button / menu item in the custom title bar, which will open up a menu where you can toggle the Command Center (it will show a checkmark beside the "Command Center" item if it is enabled).
There's a command toggle.window.commandCenter that simply flips the value of the above setting, which you can put in a keybinding if you wish.
If you already have it enabled but want to toggle visibility of specific parts of it, then just right click any part of the Command Center, which will open up a menu with items for each part, where clicking an item will toggle whether it is visible or not. As a nice quality-of-life feature, the menu will prevent you from disabling all parts (doing so would leave you with nothing to click to re-enable parts, and you'd best just disable the whole Command Center if you want that anyway).
That feature might have been removed / have regressed circa 1.83- I can't use it in 1.83. I tried looking for a related issue ticket but couldn't find one. It seems to brought it back in v1.96. And also added a workbench.navigationControl.enabled setting.
Note that if you are instead interested in adding custom parts to it, see How I can add tools/actions/buttons to the Command Center of VS Code.