Welp, I had a couple of shocks when I visited a new-to-me system. I had the TCE display turned off via keybind, but I got some panels popping up despite that.
After arrival, while in supercruise over the star lining up for the station, I had a panel pop up for the new-to-me star. I had to mouse to close it. And as I use the mouse to control pitch and yaw, my ship was wobbling in supercruise until I closed the panel.
Then upon getting close to the planet where the station was, I had a popup panel for the planet. Again, a scramble to close the panel while blowing the deceleration into the station.
After landing, I pulled up the TCE Options looking for a way to disable these. I think they're under Panel Configuration and I think it's the radio button "Activate Waypoint Panel", but I'm not sure. I looked through the wiki but still aren't sure. I want to disable the popup effect, not disable another function, and I'm not sure what does what.
Under the Options Panel wiki entry, it says "All options are self-explanatory and didn’t require a separate entry here." I'm going to have to disagree. This is a fantastic tool with many many features and controls. So much that I can't figure out what makes it do what it did above. And I'm not sure what so much of it does. And I also think it's an unfortunate default having a popup panel in the centre of the screen covering a large part of it that persists at crucial moments.
I'll have to spend some time and dig for more info on TCE. For now, instead of changing options that I'm not sure what they do, as a workaround, I'm going to have TCE only display on my laptop screen, so it doesn't block my view of ED. I can disable the display normal so I can see what I have on my laptop. And if something pops up at a crucial time, it won't cause...accidents.
But it'll still be there doing stuff. Which I really need to learn more about.