Use VS Code API to contribute view to the secondary sidebar
Resolved 💬 6 comments Opened Aug 28, 2025 by isidorn Closed Jan 24, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (gpeal, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
VS Code PM here 👋
VS Code now allows extensions to contribute views to the secondary sidebar
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/151681
I notice that in your docs you mention to users to manually move the view. With this API this will no longer be necessery, you can programmatically do it.
Keep in mind that this API is still in proposed state, and we aim to finalize it start of October. So it would be great if you try out the API - let us know if it works for you, and once it is final you should be able to use it.
<img width="1075" height="222" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/39205a40-86e4-4bb7-b259-8d3885eb6362" />
fyi @embirico
6 Comments
This is great, we will definitely use this once it is released.
@isidorn When I click the chat icon (top bar near the search form) it is going to open and close the secondary sidebar but it is going to focus on copilot chat only also if I was on the codex tab.
I think this cause I need to click twice to close the sidebar and the first click is going to focus on copilot chat tab.
@bhack yeah good point - I think that UI interaction is up for discussion. Can you file a new issue here https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues and ping me on it. Thanks
@isidorn Are we blocked by https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/203288 ?
Cause I saw https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/247175
@bhack yes, I think your request is covered by https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/203288 so best to upvote / comment on that one.
This feature request hasn't had any activity in many months, so I'm going to close it.