I recently discovered one of my colleagues was a vertical tab zealot, running vertical tab layouts on Chrome, Visual Studio, Windows, virtually everything. It was actually kind of neat, so I started reconfiguring my layouts to emulate it, only to find out... VS Code still doesn't support it? In 2023??

I remember trying to move over to vertical tab layouts a few years ago, only to find VS Code had no support for it. And naturally, I wouldn't want to obligate my already feeble mind into constantly context-switching between horizontal and vertical tab layouts, so I just decided against it entirely.

But in my latest effort I had absolutely no doubt in my mind that VS Code had added support by now. After all, VS Code is great and they've added support for practically every popular feature request!

Why Is This Issue Still Open?

This issue that was created in 2020 has almost 400 upvotes and has had active discussion since it was opened.

I remember seeing it shortly after it was posted. And I remember seeing another issue opened for this in 2017. In fact, it might be one of the 3 other related (closed as duplicate) issues listed in this issue. What the heck Microsoft?

The problem is I'd already configured my Visual Studio and Chrome to be vertical tabs. So I looked into some alternatives.

The Most Viable Alternative

Thankfully after about 5 seconds of Googling, I came upon Dominik Weber's blog post, showing the closest thing to vertical tabs you're gonna get:

This just takes advantage of the secondary sidebar (toggled via View > Appearance > Secondary Sidebar) and the Open Editors panel.

Then you can just hide the standard horizontal tabs with the workbench.editor.showTabs setting.

It's not a bad workaround, and it should be sufficient to appease my wanting. But it isn't nearly as customizable as Visual Studio's vertical tabs, where you're able to sort items in alphabetical order or group items by their project, instead only allowing us to group by code panels.

/rant