Upgrading VS Code Work-space

Nitish Kumar Singh
4 min readNov 12, 2019

There are some setting in VS Code which can help you in improving your work-space. I am not going to show you any extensions or install any. I will use internal settings of VS Code which will improve our work-space.

  • 1. breadcrumbs : It is mainly used in website and it really handy there. breadcrumbs is useless in Editor, at least I had never use it. I haven’t seen anyone using it.

Breadcrumbs are mainly used in Website and here is a snap of breadcrumbs from bootstrap

So Disable the breadcrumbs from the settings

  • 2. minimap: Minimap is not very common, I haven’t seen it in lots of editor. Minimap is available in few editors. I don’t understand the exact use case of minimap. using minimap I can scroll up and down but I can do that using Scroll bar also. So, why minimap ? I seen lots of developer coding in live conferences and they also don’t use it. Although most of the people are not using it they why they don’t disable it. So, the we can get some more area in editor.

So, Disable the minimap from the settings

  • 3.Side Bar : Side is important, I use it and everyone of use it. So, I am not going to tell you to disable. Side Bar is a awesome things but the location/position of sidebar is wrong. It should be in Right but it’s in left.

Why it should be left ?

Whenever we open and close the sidebar, the editor area move little right. So, we need to move our eyes to little right for reading the code. Opening and closing of side bar are done lots of time while coding. If you open the side bar and don’e close it then you can keep it in left but if you close the sidebar to get extra space.

Then you should change the position of the sidebar to right

  • 4.Open Editors: In VS Code we see the opened file in the Side Bar. We don’t usually use the open editors to move from one file to other. Basically there are 3 ways to move to any file.
  1. From the project hierarchy
  2. Open Editors
  3. Tabs

We usually use the tabs/project hierarchy. So open editors is useless there for most of us. There is a default limit of 3/5/9 file to be shown in the open editors, it means if you have more than 9 file open then you can switch between recent 3/5/9 files only from the open editors. The file limit can be anything but there is a limit and you can’t see more than that.

So, get rid of the open editors and get more area in the side bar

  • 5.Status Bar : Bottom status bar is cool and I had seen lots of developer uses it for opening the Terminal. Most of the developer uses the status bar and that is very useful for opening the terminal. VS Code is pro editor and there are lots of shortcut and you can bind some more shortcut with some other features. If you get

If you really use the status bar for 1–2 purpose then probably you should hide it and get some more extra space.

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Nitish Kumar Singh

Web🌐/ Mobile📱/ GraphQL / Cloud☁️ . Full-time programmer, part-time content creator, and Freelancer.