Command to make activityBar, menuBar, and statusbar visible (or invisible), or determine their current state, not just toggle

[dmalan]

For educational use cases, we're hoping to configure students' workspaces (via Remote settings in Codespaces) to have a standard UI and also provide students with a command and button (via our own extension) via which they can restore their workspace's UI to that default state if they accidentally disable various UI elements while experimenting. At the moment, though, it seems that the visibility of the activityBar, menuBar, and statusbar can only be toggled, not explicitly set to visible or invisible. And there doesn't seem to be a way to inspect their current state, so as to know programmatically (when resetting the UI to a default state) whether or not to toggle them.

Might it be possible to supplement the commands below with commands like workbench.action.enable{ActivityBar,Statusbar,MenuBar} and workbench.action.disable{ActivityBar,Statusbar,MenuBar}?

• workbench.action.toggleActivityBarVisibility
• workbench.action.toggleStatusbarVisibility
• workbench.action.toggleMenuBar

Thank you!

CC @rongxin-liu

[yume-chan]

Those built-in commands just flip the corresponding settings:

• workbench.activityBar.visible
• workbench.statusBar.visible
• window.menuBarVisibility

You can read/write these setting keys in your extension directly.

[sbatten]

@yume-chan is correct that this can already be done in an extension via the settings

[rongxin-liu]

Thank you! @yume-chan and @sbatten.

Is setting "window.menuBarVisbility" available currently? I'm getting this prompt when trying to use this setting:

[sbatten]

@rongxin-liu it is only available as a user setting, not a workspace setting

[dmalan]

Ah, thanks very much, @yume-chan, @sbatten. Just proposed window.menuBarVisbility as a potential Remote setting, too, in fact, #133786. Thank you!

[sana-ajani]

Would it be possible to programmatically toggle specific views or items inside the activity bar, status bar, terminal? For instance, in the education use case, @dmalan has mentioned that they'd like to only show the Explorer view in the activity bar, or only show the Terminal view and hide the Problems, Output, etc.

So instead of just showing and hiding the whole bar, could we provide more control from the settings? Something like:

  "workbench.acivityBar.visible": {
      "fileExplorerView": true,
      "searchView": false,
      "extensionsView": false,
      "debugView": false,
      "sourceControlView": false,
  }

cc @sbatten

[sbatten]

That's not currently possible as the users preferences for this are stored in a separate state. Technically that data is sync'd with settings sync so it is export/importable, but we don't have a model today for sharing that state.

[isidorn]

Closing this as there are already some solutions proposed in this issue, and we plan to introduce Profiles soon that will cover the remaining asks. Here's the issue tracking profiles #116740