Force VSCode to have only 1 file opened

Question

I want VSCode to have only a single file tab (editor) at a time. When I switch files VSCode should replace the opened file with a new one instead of creating a new tab (editor) for it.

"workbench.editor.showTabs": false makes it so that there is only 1 tab visible. This is exactly how I want things to look like, but under the hood VSCode still creates a new tab for each file. You can see them if you set this parameter back to true or try to cycle through tabs with Ctrl+Tab.

Answer 1

There are these 3 settings that do exactly what I want to achieve:

// Disable tabs visually
"workbench.editor.showTabs": false,
// Enable the limit for number of opened tabs
"workbench.editor.limit.enabled": true,
// Set max amount of opened tabs. Older tabs will be closed
"workbench.editor.limit.value": 1,

There is also an extension called zentabs but has some flaws and is pretty much obsolete since what it does can be achieved natively.