Allow to dock editors, views and panels anywhere in the workbench

[natalie-o-perret]

Would be nice if tabs (inc. Terminal) could be arranged with a docking layout component like, it's kinda frustrating to not be able to have the layouts we are used to work with.

[bpasero]

@ehouarn-perret can you clarify what that means?

[natalie-o-perret]

@bpasero sure, basically about the code editor part, the layout can only be vertical.
It would be better and maybe desirable if the editor could provide more layout options, a sort of docking-like component.
This would not only be applicable to the code editor part but also to the console.
However, I'm not so sure whether what I'm suggesting is out of the scope of vscode objectives.

[natalie-o-perret]

Out of curiosity, are (free) external components allowed to be in used when developing a feature? Like for example https://golden-layout.com
(I haven't digged much tho).

Considering that there is already something in use for the current tabs system I guess and assume it's probably better to simply leverage and extend what is already existing.

[Alex-Addy]

Has there been any progress on this? Something general like this, or more specifically #14148 would be very helpful for my situation and this appears to have been forgotten.

[costincaraivan]

In case there's MS devs taking a look at this issue, what some people want (myself included) is basically the workflow from screen/tmux + vim or from Emacs or more recently from vim itself, which now has a terminal command built-in.

Basically there's a grid layout and you can put anything in the grid sections. Generally "anything" is either a editor window or a terminal but it can be a documentation browser or something else.

This is obviously very powerful and flexible. Visual Studio Code has a more limited design, inspired by good ole Visual Studio, with 1 debug console, 1 problem window, 1 output window etc. For terminal windows especially it would make a lot of sense to have them embeddable in any grid section.

[natalie-o-perret]

@costincaraivan
Well something slightly more flexible is also okay ;-)
I keep thinking that something like https://golden-layout.com/ in the Visual Studio code fashion would be the way to goooooo!

[natalie-o-perret]

The grid layout feature has been released!

[natalie-o-perret]

The grid layout feature has been released!