Vscode: Setting to Disable Outline Sidebar

Search Terms

performance, outline, sidebar, settings, markdown, typescript

Suggestion

A setting to disable the sidebar outline altogether.

userSettings.outline.isDisabled = true;
workspaceSettings.outline.isDisabled = true;

Alternatively, if it could be hidden by default and the work could be deferred until the first expansion that would be satisfactory.

userSettings.outline.shouldHideByDefault = true;
workspaceSettings.outline.shouldHideByDefault = true;

Use Cases

• Outline sidebar can cause UI non-responsiveness. Particularly on large markdown documents.
• Personally, I dislike the visual noise so would at least like a setting to hide by default. Having to manually collapse it upon opening every window is frustrating.

Examples

The following are bugs, but represent a few reasons why a developer might want to disable the outline to improve performance. At least until a plugin's performance issues are resolved, which could be dependent on a 3rd party.

• https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/28389
• https://github.com/yzhang-gh/vscode-markdown/issues/42

Checklist

My suggestion meets these guidelines:

• [x] This wouldn't be a breaking change in existing TypeScript/JavaScript code
• [x] This wouldn't change the runtime behavior of existing JavaScript code
• [x] This could be implemented without emitting different JS based on the types of the expressions
• [x] This isn't a runtime feature (e.g. library functionality, non-ECMAScript syntax with JavaScript output, etc.)
• [x] This feature would agree with the rest of TypeScript's Design Goals.