Sublime Forum

Side Bar view option greyed out (sidebar)

#1

Brand new, portable “install” of ST3 x64 Build 3126 on Windows 10 Pro x64 – literally (actual meaning) and I can’t make the sidebar display.

Ctrl+K, Ctrl +B does not work.

View → Hide Sidebar is greyed out.

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Okay, I’ve just solved this, but I think it’s essentially a bug.

I hit the View → Show Open Files options and, hey presto, the sidebar showed itself and the Hide Side Bar option was no longer greyed out! I can now Ctrl+K, Ctrl+B to my heart’s content.

Obviously this is a simple little workaround and it only took me 5-10 minutes frustration,but it would be nice if you didn’t have to go through this the first time!

Thanks for a great text editor!

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#2

I believe this is by design and not a bug. The sidebar will automatically hide itself if it has nothing to show you. It can show you the list of open files and it can show you the folders you currently have open.

When the option to show open files is turned off, the sidebar thus will not display itself if you don’t open a folder/add a folder to your project.

Based on the design philosophy of “minimal UI Chrome” I think that’s just to save space that would be wasted if you don’t have any open folders and you don’t want to see a (possibly redundant) list of open files.

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#3

I don’t disagree with hiding it by default and the whole “Minimal UI Chrome”, I disagree with the keyboard shortcut not working.

Is there a good reason that the keyboard shortcut shouldn’t work even when Show Open Files is disabled?

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#4

From the position of not wanting extra useless chrome, I think it makes sense that if there are no open folders and the option for viewing open files is turned off that the sidebar is useless and so the command shouldn’t do anything. It’s at least consistent in that the menu command is also disabled. It’s logically similar to the keyboard shortcut for Undo not doing anything if there isn’t anything to undo.

That said I’ve been confused by this in the past, but from a different perspective; I couldn’t remember what the keyboard shortcut was that did it, so I tried to find the command in the command palette, where it didn’t show up because disabled commands are not displayed there. It wasn’t until I sought out the command in the menu and saw that it was grayed out that I twigged to what was going on. For a minute I thought I was going crazy.

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#5

Just ran into this again and had a few moment think about where that damned setting was again.

What you right is logical, but I still don’t like it – I think this is a bad default and harms discoverability for new users. I love the detailed flexibility of Sublime Text, but I also love it’s good defaults – this just ain’t one of them.

The simple solution is to have the default setting for the sidebar set to “Show open files”. That way you can open the sidebar and it simply shows up empty. I imagine this would also resolve your issue by NOT hiding the disabled command in the command palette! Again, aiding discoverability of this feature (one I quite like).

This doesn’t show extra useless chrome, since the sidebar is closed by default and it’s pretty clear if you open it without any files/folders open that it’s empty because there aren’t any files/folders.

What’s the argument for not being able to see files in a folder structure anyway? What’s the use case? I hadn’t fully parsed the “Open” part of that option. Okay, I guess the simple fix may well NOT be to have that option on by default.

In which case I go back to my original request that the keyboard shortcuts and the command palette commands are discoverable (aka NOT disabled) when the sidebar is hidden, there are no open folders and the Show Open Files option is turned off. And adding in

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#6

Just to recap:

  1. The sidebar can not be displayed if it is blank, because well, it would just be a big empty box. Quite literally useless.
  2. The two things that can be shown in the sidebar are the Open Files and Folders
  3. If you don’t open a folder, the Folders heading is hidden, since there are none to show
  4. Open Files is a duplicate of the functionality of tabs. Tabs are shown by default, so we don’t represent the same data twice in the UI, by default.
  5. Thus, I think it seems logical that since we don’t want to display duplicate data, by default, and tabs seem like the most common UI paradigm, we default to show those and keep Open Files off.
  6. Since Open Files is disabled by default, and no Folders are present, and the siderbar is blank, there is nothing to show.

I realize that it may not feel intuitive, but I am not sure there is a better solution. Showing an empty sidebar with nothing in it would probably be just as unintuitive. Switching to using Open Files instead of tabs is probably the opposite of what the majority of users want.

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#7

Thank you for the response.

I agreed with 4 and 5 in my edit as I realised my error that is was specifically open files and therefore duplicating the tab functionality, and not just hiding the files from the view (which obviously would make no sense as well, and was part of the disconnect I was experiencing). I’m completely on board with the default of hiding open files in the sidebar now.

Regarding 1, 2 and 6 though, let me propose a solution, which would allow the keyboard shortcut to work and the command to show up in the command palette (aiding discoverability and reducing confusion as to why something isn’t working), while not being completely useless.

This when, when you press Ctrl+K, B and everything is empty, the sidebar would open up (and you could see the command in the palette you would see this:

The message and button could disappear when a folder is opened, and the open files would still be hidden by default.

This way:

  1. the commands an keyboard shortcuts work by default.
  2. open files are hidden so tab content is not duplicated.
  3. you no longer have to go into a second level menu in order to select an option to then enable display of the bar.
  4. discoverability of the sidebar is improved since you can now activate it via two additional methods.

The reason that I think 3 is important is that you can’t know ahead of time if you have closed your project folders (and the sidebar has been disabled and therefore Ctrl+K, B/command palette won’t work) or if you’ve just temporarily toggled visibility (and Ctrl+K, B/command palette will).

I hope this makes more sense now and is a workable solution to solving both my (respectful, minor) complain and OdatNurd’s, without upsetting any currently expected behaviour.

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