Permanent icon bar on the right ?

[lpatiny]

This issue is related to:

• Create ToolWindow component zakodium-oss/react-science#243.

Currently when the panels are hidden it becomes practically invisible and the users do not know it exists.

One possibility is to have a permanent icon bar on the right that displays an icon for all the available panels (as defined in the global preferences).

Each panel could also have a little cross (close icon) on the right of the header to close it. I would remove the current behaviour of closing the panel by clicking on the header.

Only the 'open' panel would be displayed (the panel header would also be removed). Currently the closed panels take a big space and this would solve this issue. If you want to display a panel you would need to click on the corresponding toggle icon.

There could be as well a minimal width and if you try to reduce the size of the panels columns it would stop at the minimal width or close if you go over half of this minimal width like in vscode for example.

[targos]

This should also be discussed in relation to another example: JetBrains IDEs such as WebStrom have an interesting implementation of panels.

[hamed-musallam]

We can implement buttons similar to Visual Studio Code by changing them a little bit the behavior, Toggling one of these buttons would add a panel with a vertical splitter, providing us the flexibility to add or remove panels and control vertical sizes.

but this require a designer to create distinctive icons for each panel; otherwise, they may end up having similar icons, and the overall visual presentation might not be optimal

[lpatiny]

After some discussions here is the proposed behaviour:

• There is a toolbar with icons on the right that are 'toggle' buttons. One icon per active panel (active meaning that the panel is active in the current workspace)
• This toolbar could optionally be hidden in the general preferences but would be anyway active by default
• Toggle off would remove the corresponding panel. If all the buttons are off, the full panel column will disappear
• Clicking on the header of a panel will, like now, collapse the panel
• There is a new icon 'close' in the header of the panel that allows to hide it. Only way to let it appear again is to click on the corresponding button in the right toolbar
• Further development will involve individual vertical resize of the panels.

What is still not clear to me is how those buttons are related to the width of the column (containing the panels) and if we keep a way to collapse this column. One way that seems logical to me is that when we collapse (click twice on the separator) we actually turn off all the panels (and side effect is that we hide this column).