Right but VSCode doesn't work well with that bar disabled: for example, now I hid the activity bar (that's how it's called it seems), I clicked on a .status file and VSCode said "There are extensions for this file". I clicked on that, and now I have an extensions bar at the directories tree bar place. This happens because this UI setting is not the default one, so you encounter such kind of confusing behaviors every time you move away from the default behavior.