Along the same lines as this comment: is it possible to toggle the sidebar off completely (sometimes it is a little invasive). It seems that the option options.disp_sidebar = False does not do, or is it not intended to completely hide it all the times?

@gennaro-tedesco b should do it for the current sheet!

I think the reason options.sidebar is not doing the trick, is because Sheet-options override general options sometimes, and the disp_sidebar check happens for the Sheet-option. I'll copy-paste this into that thread.

The current workaround for you is to play with options.disp_help = 0. I'm not sure if disp_help will stick around conceptually, but for 3.0.x, you can use it to turn off the sidebar by default.

b does indeed toggle the sidebar off, however only for the current invocation. Display any other action that would require the sidebar would toggle the sidebar back on (and the user would have to press b all the times). options.disp_help = 0 does not affect the sidebar either.

I understand this is just minor nitpicking, however I wanted to mention this behaviour in case you happen to do some work on the sidebar and may consider this too :)

With options.disp_sidebar=False, the sidebar is only be shown for input help and status messages. Input help can be disabled with vd.options.disp_help=0 with the above change. There is no way to disable the sidebar entirely for status messages, but any command will clear the status sidebar, including Ctrl+L.

We do need a better knob to control how the sidebar works, but that's for #2202. This issue is specifically for the "cosmetic" issue where the sidebar is quite unhelpfully obscured by the command palette.