how to enlarge the sidebar or add a horizontal scrollbar in sphinx (sphinx_rtd_theme)?

Question

I'm a newbie in Sphinx and CSS. Basically when I try to automatically generate the documentation by simply adding 'modules' to default conf.py and using sphinx_rtd_theme, I get too long names (fully qualified domain name) on the sidebar that are not fully displayed because of short sidebar's width.

Is there any way to solve this issue? Adding a horizontal scrollbar? Or enlarge the sidebar's width? Or?

Answer 1

The easiest way to arrange the lateral navigational menu is to use custom CSS to enable horizontal scroll-bar.

The steps to do that are few:

1. Find the div class that wraps the lateral menu (you can use the browser inspector). In the Classic theme the name is sphinxsidebarwrapper;
2. In _static folder add a new file called custom.css (or other name if you want). If you have one folder for build and one for source (depends on choice made during sphinx-quickstart), use the _static folder in source folder. The CSS file have to contain only one rule:

   .sphinxsidebarwrapper {  overflow-y: scroll; }
   

3. Add in conf.py the line below, after html_static_path = ['_static']:

   html_css_files = ["custom.css"]