did you know that you can move around vs codes Explorer? Now, there are two common places you might want to move it. One would be into the secondary sidebar on the opposite side of the screen as your main sidebar, and then the other one would be down into the panel. Let's take a look at how you can move to both these locations. So, to move to the secondary sidebar, I'm going to go over to my activity bar over here and find the Explorer item, and then I'm going to start clicking and dragging. Now, I'm going to just click and drag the Explorer item over to the right side of my screen, and it's going to say, Hey, I can put this into the secondary sidebar by popping open the secondary sidebar here. Now, if I drop this, you'll see that my Explorer is now living in the secondary sidebar over on this side of the screen. This is useful because all of our existing views have stayed over on the primary sidebar side, so we could have something like the git Source control view visible while also having our Explorer visible at the

same time, also if you don't like this order where the secondary sidebar is over on the right-hand side, and the primary sidebar is over on the left-hand side, you can always swap out the order. So if I open up the command palette with Ctrl + Shift + P or Command + Shift + P and then say toggle sidebar, if I run the view toggle primary sidebar position command, you'll notice how the two sidebars have now switched sides, and we now have the primary sidebar over on the right and that secondary sidebar that we created with the Explorer over on the left. So I'm just going to go and kind of reset things. So if you want to go and put the Explorer back in its original location from the secondary sidebar, all you have to do is click and drag in the secondary sidebar here and then move it back over into the activity bar just where it was before. Now the other place that you can put the Explorer is down into the panel. So let's open up the panel here, and we could actually have the Explorer show down here as well. So again, I'm just

going to go and click and drag on the explore icon in the activity bar over here. I'm going to go and drag that down into the panel and create a new item by dragging it into the top of the panel right here. So let's go over to the left-hand side and create a new explore item here when I can just drop that there. Now if I open this up, you can see that the Explorer view is showing down in the panel along with all of our existing panel views that we had set up before. Again, this can be quite useful because now we have the Explorer that's visible along with the primary sidebar views that we were looking at before. Now in both of these cases, so moving the Explorer to the panel like here or moving it to the secondary sidebar, we've actually moved the entire Explorer view. So that's going to include both the file explorer here along with things like the timeline and the outline view. So you can see that the outline view has also been moved over. Now if we wanted to just move

the file explorer that is possible to do as well. So let's go and click and drag on the explore item from the panel. Put it back into our original primary sidebar here. Now, if we open up the Explorer view, let's say that we just wanted to move the file explorer and leave the outline documentation timeline all of those additional views in place. To do that, instead of clicking and dragging on the activity bar item here for the Explorer, I can just click and drag on the explore item for my current folder. So I'll click and drag on the folders item here. And when I actually do this now, I can go and just take that one View and put it either into the secondary sidebar or down into the panel. So let's go and put into the panel in this case. And you'll notice that now the outline and all the other parts of that Explorer item have remained behind over in the primary sidebar where just the file explorer has now been moved down into the panel. As you can see, there's quite a

lot of room for customization now. If you really mess up your views and just want to reset everything, you can always use the reset view locations command. So, opening the command palette with Ctrl+Shift+P or Ctrl+Shift+P, I can say reset view. Now, if I run the view reset view locations command here, now everything will be put back into its original locations. So, that's how you can move VS Code's Explorer into the secondary sidebar or down into the panel. Try experimenting and finding a layout that works well for you.

VS Code tips — Moving the explorer view to the panel or secondary side bar

Hi, I'm Matt Bierner! I work on VS Code and created this channel to share some of my favorite tips and tricks for working efficiently with VS Code.