When I right-click the activity bar there is a menu entry labeled “Activity Bar Position”.
When I first installed Cursor, I changed this from “Default” to “Top”, because I wanted to know what this “Activity Bar Position” setting meant. It did nothing.
Now that I changed workbench.activityBar.orientation to vertical, “Default” means vertical, and “Top” makes it, well, horizontal at the top, somewhat similar to what the initial default setting is. The workbench.activityBar.orientation = horizontal is better integrated, though.
But, since this menu entry is what essentially decides where the activityBar is located, it would make sense to add an option to this “Activity Bar Position” menu as a checkbox item which is by default checked and has the label “Horizontal”.
Then again, now that I checked it while it is set as horizontal, this “Activity Bar Position” menu does not show up when right-clicking the Activity Bar, like it does when it is set to vertical. It is only visible in “View → Appearance”.
It feels a bit like the team didn’t know about this “Activity Bar Position” and re-implemented in part? Probably while they were adding the small “Welcome” pane, which is lost when “vertical” is set?
In my case, I want as much height as possible in the sidebar because the “Explorer” and the “Open Editors” should display as many files as possible.
And regarding “to free up horizontal space for the chat”: I prefer to change the AI chat into an editor and then drag it out of the main window so that it becomes a separate window which I can place on another monitor. This is how I was doing it with Copilot.