How can I configure the sidebar and panel's default sizes in VS Code?

Question

On a daily basis I use a specific layout on two screen, the first half is for my browser, the next 3 are used by vscode (it takes first screen ),

┌─────────┬─────────┐┌─────────┬─────────┐
│ Browser │ Vscode  ││ Vscode  │ Vscode  │
│         │ Sidebar ││ Editor  │ Editor  │
│         │ & Panel ││         │         │
└─────────┴─────────┘└─────────┴─────────┘

My problem is I often have the situation where the sidebar or the panel got resized, resizing them by hand to fit is annoying, when I double click on the border of the sidebar and of the panel, they resize to their default size.

Is it possible to set their default sizes or to have a command to resize them to a predefined size?

Answer 1

At the time of this writing (VS Code 1.75), configuring the default sizes of the sidebar and panel is not supported.

Settings that have to do with the display of workbench areas generally start with workbench and then the name of the area. At the time of this writing, there is only one setting that starts with workbench.sidebar. It is workbench.sidebar.location, which you can either set to "left" or "right", and only two settings starting with workbench.panel: workbench.panel.defaultLocation, and workbench.panel.opensMaximized.

There's an open issue ticket on VS Code's GitHub repo asking for configuring the sidebar's default size (and other related things) to be a feature: Sidebar defaultWidth, View-Specific Sidebar widths, & View-Specific Sidebar defaultWidths #158603. ^{_{You can show your support for the issue ticket by giving a thumbs up reaction to the issue. But please don't make a "me too" comment. "me too" comments generally come off as annoying to repo maintainers because they clutter up discussion and don't contribute anything of significant value.}}

There's also a GitHub issue for default panel size: Allow customization of the default panel height #14452, but it seems to have gotten closed due to not being high-enough priority.

See also How can I force the VS Code panel to be certain height on startup?.