How to completely disable output scroll lock in Visual Studio Code?

No solution right now (May 2019)

I don't know if this behavior is intended or if it's a bug, but I think currently there is no real solution to entirely solve this problem.

Maybe the provided workarounds help you to better stay in control of how the output scrolling works.

Workarounds

Bring focus back to current output

1. Disable scroll lock: (lock should now be open)
2. Click the "Clear Output"-button:
   (or open the context menu of the output console (right click) and choose "Clear Output")
3. Remove focus: Make sure the output console is not focused anymore
4. Re-run the program
   (with Code Runner: ctrl + alt + N)

Avoid the problem

If you need to check some output which isn't in the current view, hover over the output window and make sure to just scroll using your mouse wheel without clicking inside the output window.

---

Tested with VSCode version 1.33.1 and CodeRunner version v0.9.9.

It looks like the fix for this was released in March 2020 rather silently, as the hidden setting output.smartScroll.enabled.

You'll need to make the following change in settings.json:

  "output.smartScroll.enabled": false

Found this change mentioned here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/69480#issuecomment-593401640