Hiding the sidebar in Ubuntu

Auto-Hide of side bar (or Ubuntu dock in 17.10 and later) in Ubuntu desktop can be easily done as following:

1. Go to System Settings.
2. Then go to Appearance (Dock in Ubuntu 18.04).
3. Click on Behavior.
4. Turn on the Auto Hide Launcher (Auto-hide the Dock in Ubuntu 18.04). By default it is off.

Above solutions don't work for Ubuntu 17.10+,

for Ubuntu 17.10 GNOME Desktop,

goto Settings>Dock>Auto-hide the Dock and toggle it to hide automatically.

also, you can customize the position of sidebar and icon-sizes.

Ubuntu 18.04

Toggling on the setting Settings > Dock > Auto-hide the Dock hides the dock as the setting hint says i.e The dock hides when any windows overlap with it, however when switching back to the Desktop the Dock appears.

In earlier versions like Ubuntu 14.04 there was following setting System Settings > Appearance > Behavior > Auto Hide Launcher enabling which the Dock auto-hide on Desktop as well and could be accessed by hovering the Dock position, which is by default Left.

To restore the desired behaviour on Desktop as well I followed the steps below I found at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-dock-add-true-autohide-option-to-default-session/11200/4 which worked spot-on:

you can use dconf editor GUI to access all the features of Ubuntu Dock. They are located here: org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock The parameter you need to activate “true autohide option” is intellihide.

To quickly enable it, you can use the following command:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock intellihide false

After that, turning on autohide option in System Settings will activate “true autohide” instead of the default intellihide.

To get things back just obviously run

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock intellihide true