How do I hide the VS Code view bar

View -> Hide Activity Bar

Menu entry was changed at some point

View -> Appearance -> Hide Activity Bar

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It's also possible to hide it from the context menu.

Command: workbench.action.toggleActivityBarVisibility

From Command Palette: Toggle Activity Bar Visibility

This is currently not possible, but the option has several open feature requests against it on github. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1105