Support showing the activity bar in alternate layouts

[j-f1]

By default the activity bar is displayed on the left side of the editor. However, a more compact layout (especially if you have a shortcut to toggle the sidebar) would be above or below the sidebar content:

Placing it on the top would resemble how Xcode lays out its sidebar:

[vscodebot]

(Experimental duplicate detection)
Thanks for submitting this issue. Please also check if it is already covered by an existing one, like:

• Feature Request: Ability to split sidebar vertically (#57269)

[miguelsolorio]

Also similar to Nova:

[miguelsolorio]

Adding vertical activity bar to the list as well (from #128376):

Example:

Visual Studio sidebar toggle (Icons come form Visual Studio Iconizer)

Jetbrains IDE:

[NuckChorris]

I use Customize UI for this right now but it's a massive hack and it doesn't work in Codespaces. Would love to see this supported natively so that I can switch to Codespaces 😅

[manojbaishya]

Customize UI and Monkey Patch have stopped working on VSCode v1.74 due to #166126 [1]. Can we please have more upvotes on this issue?

[1] iocave/customize-ui#156

My personal preference is to have the activity bar at the top as follows:

[garfunkel]

Thanks for pointing that out - that is indeed annoying.

Hopefully they do fix this, it's an oddly rather large amount of space that's simply being wasted right now with some icons that are rarely actually clicked, especially compared to other touch targets. Some of us have to use rather large font sizes and it cuts down on the number of characters in a horizontal line that can fit on-screen just that little more than is really necessary.

[The-Compiler]

Perhaps I'm stating the obvious here for some, but I've been using Customize UI for so long that I forgot: Via a right click (or the "View: Toggle Activity Bar Visibility" commmand), you can also hide the activity bar entirely.

For me personally, this is a good-enough solution, since I'm using VSpaceCode for keyboard control and Edamagit for Git integration, which leads to me really not using the activity bar at all.

[MuhsinFatih]

@The-Compiler CustomizeUI was killed by a recent vscode update 😢

[The-Compiler]

@MuhsinFatih That's exactly why my comment above mentions a solution not involving Customize UI.

[sandy081]

Implemented in this PR - #195067

• Activity bar position setting that supports side, top of primary side bar and hidden.
• Deprecated activity bar visibility setting in favour of this new setting
• Top position is supported only in custom title bar mode
• Global actions (account, gear) are shown in title bar to the right and badges are supported

[louisefindlay23]

Awesome. Would it be possible to have bottom of primary side bar too?

[sandy081]

It is possible, but not planned.

[dacapoday]

Trying to use plugins to simulate:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dacapoday.status-bar-button

[sandy081]

Leaving this open to support bottom location for activity bar.

[starball5]

Why is the entry for this in the March iteration plan titled "Move activity bar to bottom"? Is the default position being to be changed to the bottom? Or does it just mean that plan item is to support moving it to the bottom?

[benibenj]

In addition to the current configurations, we also want to support bottom.
This means for workbench.activityBar.location we would have side, top, bottom and hidden

[abhijit-chikane]

#195561 would love to see this as well

[benibenj]

In the next insiders release we will support moving the Activity Bar to the bottom.
We also changed the layout of the activity bar at the top. It will now be rendered above the side bar title which solves many problems.

[mksoska]

Will there be an option to hide the Manage (gear wheel) icon from the title bar as well as the Accounts icon? Currently on macOS, all elements of the title bar are optional, except the Accounts and Manage icons with activity bar position top. Possibly, the Manage icon could be moved to the area above sidebar, like this:

[abhijit-chikane]

it is very hard to understand which one is currently selected

earlier we had this border at the bottom but now it seems to be missing

[benibenj]

@abhijit-chikane this is a bug and should be fixed in insiders on monday

[abhijit-chikane]

@benibenj it is not working on the vscode web version
I have set it at the top and now it is not visible there

[benibenj]

Thanks for reporting @abhijit-chikane. I found the problem and fixed it. Should work again in Mondays insiders release

[imoby]

One other bug I noticed is that when docked to top or bottom, clicking the explorer button twice does not show/hide the explorer view. it does that when its docked to the left side