Control how you view your VS Code

Photo by Farzad Nazifi on Unsplash

VS Code as a code editor has many ways to customize the way it looks in your workspace— your files, things you’re searching, terminal, and many more. And f̶o̶r̶t̶u̶n̶a̶t̶e̶l̶y you can do most of them with using shortcuts.

Take note that windows equivalent of cmd (⌘) key is ctrl.

Side Bar

Each tab on the side bar has their own shortcut keys if you want to toggle their visibility. You can see them below:

1. Explorer → shift + cmd + E
2. Search → shift + cmd + F
3. Source Control → ctrl + shift + G
4. Run → ctrl + shift + D
5. Extensions → shift + cmd + X

Additionally, you can just toggle whatever on the side bar is by pressing ⌘B so you’ll have more space to look at your code.

Grid Tab System

If you have more than 1 tab in your workspace, you can just drag the tab to the edge of your current tab and a rectangle effect will cover a portion of your current tab to tell you that the tab will be splitted in two.

Zen Mode

Contrary to the tab system above, if you want to focus on one file at a time you can toggle Zen Mode by pressing:

cmd + K, Z

You can also press Esc twice to exit.

Toggle Terminal Panel

You can toggle your terminal panel by pressing:

ctrl + `

And in recent updates you can save its panel size’s state to be partially or fully opened.