Is there community interest in an optional & customizable toolbar?

[kenneth-marut-work]

TLDR:

We've built a toolbar for our IDE that's totally optional and customizable. Yes, it strays from VSCode's UI and there are likely varying opinions on this. Is there any interest in the community for us to upstream this feature?

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Hi all,

I wanted to gauge interest from the community in upstreaming our optional & customizable toolbar to the Theia respository. This feature has been developed and included in our downstream IDE and we've already seen many users take advantage of it.

I understand that this may be a controversial topic and strays from VSCode's UI/UX but wanted to spark the conversation as there are likely other IDEs that could benefit from this feature.

Motivation

Not all users like keyboard-only access to commands. We've observed that many users of our downstream IDE have found it difficult finding access to basic functionality during the onboarding process (i.e. back+forth) and many users want visual access to frequently repeated tasks (i.e. building).

Implementation

Our toolbar is added to the application shell and can host single icons (executing a command) and custom toolbar widgets which are added through a contribution point. Toolbar layout and customizations are stored in a toolbar.json file in ~/.theia.

Features

Completely Optional

The toolbar is enabled or disabled via a preference and can be shown or hidden easily (current keyboard shortcut alt+t). In our IDE, we default it to off

Default Items and Customizability

Specify your own defaults to ship with your product. Default icons are customizable (drag and drop to rearrange, remove, add);

Rearrange/Remove/Group Items:

Add New Items:

Add Custom Widgets

Build your own widget using React and bind it to the ReactTabBarToolbarContribution point. Here's an example of a custom Tasks Dropdown that we've built for our IDE

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Feedback and feature requests are welcome!
Thanks 🙂

[vince-fugnitto]

I'd be all for it! 👍 The configurable toolbar is a staple in most full-featured IDEs, and if we think about products building applications, they would most likely want the ability to easily consume a toolbar they can configure for their users.

Additional Info:

• [Feature Request] Add permanent configurable toolbar #7540
• Add a global toolbar below the main menu #5037
• Add an optional configurable toolbar below the menu microsoft/vscode#41309

[kenneth-marut-work]

Great! thanks for the linking those issues 👍

[ImperialPenguin]

I'm just getting started and having issues getting Theia to even run. But assuming that gets worked out, I'd love to have access to this toolbar through some means.

[JonasHelming]

I simply love this, it would be a great contribution!

[lucas-koehler]

Looks awesome. I especially love the idea that you can add any command and select a custom icon. I imagine that really helps users to over time set up an intuitive toolbar that supports their workflow :)

[ndoschek]

Looks and sounds awesome! I really like this idea and could immediately think of many use cases where this toolbar would improve the usability of an editor! 👍

[ballcoach12]

+1 for me. We have been discussing how to get this done all morning until we ran across this post.

[kenneth-marut-work]

Fantastic, I'll be aiming to get a PR drafted in the following weeks!

[kenneth-marut-work]

I have posted a pull request for this feature here #10731.