Provide an option to hide the activity bar
daviwil opened this issue · 40 comments
I'd like to be able to hide the workspace button bar on the left side of the window to gain some more screen real estate and have a more text-focused experience. Users of Sublime Text and Atom may also be interested in this setting.
cc @guillermooo
@daviwil you can hide it already from the View menu or do you mean a permanent option? How would you then be using search, git, debug etc?
I was actually referring to the workspace buttons themselves:
Sorry for not being more clear! If they're not visible I'd just use key combinations to navigate to them.
+1 for this. I would say that being able to hide any distracting/unused UI elements being one of the appeal factors with the highly configurable non-IDE code editors (which I presume is the category Code is targeting).
As a side note, is there any way to vote on the feature requests? I'm pretty sure this is not the way to do it. I tried to look for tips on the submitting bugs and feature requests page but didn't find any guidelines on this.
@ristomatti Here are our guidelines which are work in progress, to be honest we haven't fully settled on how to separate a discussion inside github issues and usevoice
@egamma Thanks! I didn't previously notice the User Voice header being a link. I've now registered there and will vote for the issues there as it seems to make more sense than commenting here.
Maybe it would be a good idea to try to settle on one service that could be used for both feature requests (voting etc.) and bugs/issues? That could greatly simplify managing these.
My Band-Aid was opening the developer tools every time I open the editor and deleting the parent div (ID: workbench.parts.activitybar ) then just toggle the side-bar on and off to let the UI re-align the div positions. The long term solution would be a bar button similar to the "Show Desktop button on a Windows taskbar" on the far left of blue status bar in the editor next to the extensions icon or a workspace settings you can force in the settings.json file ("window.activitybar" : false)?
Implementation suggestion: Now that there's an option under the View menu to Toggle Status Bar, add another option for Toggle Activity Bar or similar to match.
Looking forward to this feature. Would love to use this space for something more important :)
Maybe it could be also configurable via settings:
workbench.editor.actvitiyBar.location = "left" | "sideBar" | "statusBar" | "hidden"
where
left- as it is nowsideBar- small icons in top part of side barstatusBar- small icons in status barhidden- hidden
To add to this: I think it would also be nice to be able to right-click on the bar to see the option to hide it (with the hotkey listed so you can remember how to quickly bring it back).
So, is it going to be implement?
+1 option to hide this would be super...
+1. I hope there is an option to allow to hide the view bar.
Thanks.
👍 Because with multiple open windows the bar takes a lot of real-estate of my screen, an example:
With three windows/projects open next to each other almost 20% of editor space is filled with a grey area, i'd rather use this for more code ;-)
I expect this feature to be implemented as soon as possible.
Thanks.
I need more space for my code, so I hope this feature can be implemented ASAP
This issue might seem superficial, but I fear that the activity bar is giving a very bad first impression for many curious new users, who are searching for an unobtrusive and minimal code editor experience.
I mean, it's so big, and it does so little... why has it been given so much visual focus? What else in this editor might get weirdly in my way?
I poked around a bit and attempted to implement this.
Probably a bunch of other things I need to look at or test but the code is here
I poked around a bit and attempted to implement this.
Quite impressive, looking forward to implement this into main release.
@golf1052 You should try giving them pull request.
P.S. Also will be good if add an hotkey to that.
Did another pass through making sure that the setting is reflected correctly and fixed a few bugs.
You can see like other settings you can attach a hotkey to it.
The sidebar icons and bottom bar are the only things stopping me from using vscode instead of atom
@nikhildaga You can change the visibility of the bottom bar by going to View > Hide/Show Status Bar or by setting "workbench.statusBar.visible": false (hidden) or "workbench.statusBar.visible": true (visible).
Looking forward to seeing this feature being implemented. Thanks all.
This landed with the new setting "workbench.activityBar.visible".
Thanks @golf1052 👍
Could we also get Toggle Activity Bar menu option (and ability to set keyboard shortcut) ?
I would suggest to add the setting (like it's working now) but when you set workbench.activityBar.visible to false the CMD-B will hide/show the activityBar together with the Side Bar.
@wallverb there is an entry in the menu as well as a command to toggle 👍
@cybertim I like the idea but I think this needs another option because not everyone might want to ever see the activity bar?
@bpasero that is true, but isn't 'coupling' the activitybar from the sidebar making the sidebar less functional, since it also shows a quick overview of what other activities need attention (like updates for the extensions).
But I agree, maybe have three settings for the workbench.activityBar.visible ? never always and combined ?
@cybertim I do not know how people see the activity bar. For many it may just be a toolbar or menu that they want to turn off. That is totally valid (like turning off the top level menu).
I like your suggestion though with having multiple settings, though the toggle action would probably still just hide it for good.
@bpasero I can only speak for myself, but I see the activityBar as a whole, like tabs, for the SideBar. That is why I thought it would feel more natural to hide/show the activityBar combined with the sideBar.
If we could have something like
workbench.actvitiyBar.location = "sideBar"
then @cybertim use case would be handled
I suggest to open individual issues for requests that are now coming up. They are otherwise lost in this closed work item.
+1
is the workbench.activityBar.visible available in the latest stable release. I can't get it working, so maybe i am doing something wrong
@magneticz Its only in Insiders currently, but will be available in the next stable release this month.
Should have an "auto-hide" option (shows on mouse hover)
@rafaelbdb an 1px wide sidebar with resize on mouse hover would be great, something like that might help:
.sidebar {
width: 1px;
transition: width 0.5s ease; /* for smooth show/hide */
}
.sidebar:hover {
width: 25px;
}or in js so:
sidebar.onmouseover = _widen;
sidebar.onmouseout = _shrink;
sidebar.style.transition = "width 0.5s ease";
function _widen(event) {
sidebar.style.width = 25;
}
function _shrink(event) {
sidebar.style.width = 1;
}Since the activity-bar and side-bar are closely related, what about using a single command "Toggle Side-Bar" or "Switch Side-Bar", with a single shortcut like Cmd-B, which cycled through either (a) Both on or Both off (my preference) or (b) the 4 combinations: off-off, off-on, on-off, on-on?