Is there a shortcut to hide the side bar in Visual Studio Code?

There are 3 bars on the side, 2 left and 1 right:

• the activity bar with 5 buttons
• the primary sidebar toggled by clicking any of the activity bar buttons.
• the minimap

All of these hotkeys and more (e.g. the terminal & output panel, Ctrl+J) are now visible through the View (Alt-V) and View>Appearance menus:

The activity bar has no toggle hotkey by default, but you can assign one like this:

{
   "key": "ctrl+alt+b",
   "command": "workbench.action.toggleActivityBarVisibility"
},

Or hide completely with "workbench.activityBar.visible": false

The sidebar toggle hotkey is Ctrl+B by default, but may be overridden by e.g. vim plugin, here's how to enforce or change it:

{
  "key": "ctrl+b",
  "command": "workbench.action.toggleSidebarVisibility"
},

The minimap can be hidden with "editor.minimap.enabled": false and toggled with editor.action.toggleMinimap since vscode 1.16.

And with the Sidebar-activity toggler extension, so you toggle both activity and sidebar together with one key mapping to sidebar-activity-toggler.toggleSidebarAndActivityBar

The command can be triggered via Ctrl+B on Windows and Linux or Cmd+B on the Mac.

As Benjamin Pasero's answer states you can use:

• Ctrl+B on Windows and Linux

• ⌘ Cmd+B on the Mac.

but sometimes you have another keyboard shortcut with ⌘ Cmd+B, in my case I had it to format some React code. To reverse that you can use the following:

Code > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts (⌘+K ⌘+S) then search for B and disable the other shortcut command.

You can also change the it and put which ever shortcut you want, just search for Toggle Side Bar Visibility like this:

To Hide the 5 button Activity Bar we can now:

View -> Hide Activity Bar

This is in vscode 1.9, not sure which version it was introduced in.