Hello,

So, when working with projects the sidebar is very useful for file navigation etc, however when opening single files it’s a pain.

Is there a way I can configure Sublime to automatically show the sidebar if I’m using a project and hide it on single files?

Thank you!

Hide it manually too slow? ctrl-K ctrl-B

Well I usually do that… But I would prefer a default automatic way.

FWIW the sidebar will automatically hide if there’s nothing to show, so if you stop open files from showing in the sidebar this will happen by default.

“so if you stop open files from showing in the sidebar” – I’m confused here. What do you mean? Thank you.

View > Sidebar > Hide Open Files tells the Sidebar not to display the list of files that you have open (the option changes to Show Open Files if open files are currently hidden). In that case it will only display the contents of folders that you open, but the list of open files will not appear in there.
The best way to get a feel for what that’s doing is to try it.

Sublime will hide the Sidebar (and there is no way to show it) if it knows there is nothing that can be displayed there, so with open files turned off and no folders open, the sidebar is hidden.

There doesn’t appear to be a User Preferences option to set for this?
It would be nice to have one to configure.

Indeed the side bar, mini map, tab views, status bar and menu bar all have no configuration option that controls whether they are turned on or not. Presumably the devs decided that this sort of “chrome” on the user interface is the sort of thing that you want to customize to your liking just once and not on a project by project basis.

There are however API functions available in Sublime to query and change the current state of each, so in theory a plugin could be created that would toggle them as desired, although I don’t know how easy it would be to figure out when to apply the changes (e.g. when an existing project window is switched to another project).