Two-pane layout by default

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Hi all,

first of all, let me express my immense gratitude to the community and to the supporters for this outstanding tool! It is an essential asset for me; I would not have been able to survive even a single week in work throughout my career without Wireshark!

So my question is: does anyone happen to have a native solution for disabling the "Packet Bytes" (or any) pane by default in Wireshark 3.0.3 (used on Win7)?

I seldom work with hexdumps, so I would prefer a simple two-pane layout without the "Packet Bytes" pane.

I know I can manually resize any pane to 0px height or disable them in the View menu directly, but after thousands of wasted clicks after startup, I would love to spare this effort and have by default only two panes whenever I start WS.

Even if I set up the 3rd pane to contain "None" at "Edit > Preferences... > Appearance > Layout", or start the GUI with "-o gui.layout_content_3:NONE" or set “gui.layout_content_3: NONE” in the "preferences" file a 3rd pane with no content appears (unfortunately I do not have enough points yet to upload a screenshot). I also went through the "Advanced" preferences, but I found only the same "gui." parameters which are available at "Appearance > Layout" in the GUI. (In my humble opinion this behaviour renders the setting pretty much useless; if this can be considered a bug, I would be happy to file it as I have not found one that would cover this.)

I learnt that the "gui.byte_view_show" parameter works from the command line and if set to "FALSE", I get what I want: only two panes, the "Packet List" and the "Packet Details" panes will appear. However this does not work as a "preferences" file parameter, so I had to tweak my shortcuts and the "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\wireshark-capture-file\shell\open\command" registry entry to include also "-o gui.byte_view_show:FALSE". This works, but I do not consider this a nice solution, rather only a workaround.

If this workaround is currently the only possibility, I would appreciate if the corresponding preferences could be improved eventually (and I understand the priority of the request would be about nought); I am quite positive that I am not the only L5-7 user who would appreciate a bit more headroom on the layout.

Thanks in advance!