Reputation: 1771

How to restore the menu bar in Visual Studio Code

I disabled the menu bar in preferences and it disappeared as expected. Now there's no way to get to the preferences menu again. How do I get it back?

Upvotes: 158

Answers (18)

Scott

Reputation: 1042

There are many things that could go wrong. Tiered, in order of easy to fix/likely to happen, they are:

You are in full screen mode (F11 or something similar to get out of it)
VSCode has the entire "Title Bar" (where the menu bar resides) hidden (go into settings to fix this)
- If you're on Linux, it's likely that you're dealing with option #2 ("Title Bar" is hidden), due to awful defaults in some windowing managers now, and VSCode's interpretation of how to use said defaults.
VSCode has the "Menu Bar" (which is in the title bar) either hidden, or shown in a different way (go into settings to fix this)

Are you in fullscreen mode? Usually pretty easy to tell. You might be able to use the OS specific shortcut (likely F11 for Windows/Linux and Ctrl+Cmd+F for OSX) to get out of it. If not, go to the Command Palette, using Ctrl+Shift+P (more details here), and type "fullscreen". There should be a toggle fullscreen mode option for you to click.
Is the "Title Bar" missing? It should look something like this: Go to settings (see above, Gear Icon in bottom left -> Settings) and search for "menu". Then navigate to the User -> Window settings (User/Workspace are tabs at the top, then Window is a section on the left). The last setting there: "Title Bar Style" is what you want. Change it from "Native" to "Custom"
Is the "Menu Bar" missing (though you have a title bar)? It might be missing, or just shown in a different way. Just like in option #2 above, navigate to settings (Gear Icon -> Settings), search for "menu", select User -> Window. The 2nd to bottom option is "Menu Bar Visibility". "classic" option might not be working for you. Select "visible". "toggle" might only show when you press the Alt key, "hidden" is hidden of course, and "compact" is where it shows the 3 lines menu ("hamburger menu") on the left hand pane instead.

Saving these might prompt to restart VSCode, but they took effect for me immediately regardless.

Apologies for overlap of answers, but some answers only covered some of these scenarios, and none of them covered the "Title Bar missing" scenario.

Upvotes: 4

CW Holeman II

Reputation: 4961

ALT will bring up the menu to allow an immediate action. Follow this with:

View > Appearance > Menu Bar

which will restore the menu bar.

Linux, Visual Studio Code 1.81.0

Upvotes: 3

Robert Calhoun

Reputation: 5133

In addition to setting menu visibility via the other answers, the VS Code window width must exceed a certain threshold for a normal menu to be displayed. Otherwise, you get the "hamburger menu". For my current settings, this is around 1068 pixels due the addition of the "toggle sidebar", "toggle panel", and "toggle secondary sidebar" widgets.

Upvotes: 0

Peter

Reputation: 119

To restore menu bar visibility so that you don't press key Alt to make the menu bar visible and the menu bar remains visible all the time, see the setting below.

You inadvertently changed the value from "default" to "toggle", so restore the setting to "default" as shown below.

"window.menuBarVisibility": "default"

Upvotes: 11

Jessica Hernandez

Reputation: 41

Press Ctrl + Shift + P to open the Command Palette.

Enter image description here

After that, you write menu
Option is enabled

Upvotes: 4

mLstudent33

Reputation: 1175

All these answers were wrong for me. Press ALT.

Upvotes: 1

Bukenya KizzaRoland

Reputation: 821

Here is a simple solution to bring back the activity bar. Just click on the view tab on top of vs code > appearance > then check activity bar then from there it has to appear

Upvotes: 0

mooga

Reputation: 3317

From Version: 1.56.2 on in OSX you need to update in settings.json file

"workbench.editor.showTabs": true

instead of

"window.menuBarVisibility": "default"

Upvotes: 1

Jurijs Kovzels

Reputation: 6220

For Windows users:

For older versions (<1.54) of Visual Studio Code: Press Alt to make the menu visible temporarily. While the menu is visible go to the View menu and choose Appearance -> Show Menu Bar.

For newer versions see the following steps or if Alt does not work use Crtl + Shift + P for command pallete, type 'menu' and select View: Toggle Menu Bar

Alternativily open settings Ctrl+,, search for and change Window: Menu Bar Visibility to either classic or visible.

For macOS users:

If you are in Full-Screen mode you can either move the cursor to the top of the screen to see the menu, or you can exit Full-Screen using Ctrl+Cmd+F, or ⌃⌘F in alien's script.

Upvotes: 298

theking2

Reputation: 2813

Press Ctrl+Shift+P, type menu, select View: Toggle Menu Bar and the menu bar should be back. If not add a comment

Upvotes: 0

Sabito

Reputation: 5065

Click on the 'Manage' button.
Select 'Settings'.
In the search bar type: 'menu bar visibility'.
In the drop-down select 'classic' or 'visible'.

Upvotes: 6

Mark

Reputation: 181050

Some changes to this coming in v1.54, see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs/blob/vnext/release-notes/v1_54.md#updated-application-menu-settings

Updated Application Menu Settings

The window.menuBarVisibility setting for the application menu visibility has been updated to better reflect the options. Two primary changes have been made.

First, the default option for the setting has been renamed to classic.

Second, the Show Menu Bar entry in the the application menu bar now toggles between the classic and compact options. To hide it completely, you can update the setting, or use the context menu of the Activity Bar when in compact mode.

Upvotes: 0

CSSBurner

Reputation: 1991

It's also possible that you have accidentally put the IDE into Full Screen Mode. On occasion, you may be inadertently pressing F11 to set FullScreen mode to On.

If this is the case, the Accepted Answer above will not work. Instead, you must disable Full Screen mode (View > Appearance > Full Screen).

Please see the attached screenshot.

Upvotes: 15

Taha Saber

Reputation: 51

Press Ctrl + Shift + P to open the Command Palette, then write command : Toggle Menu Bar

Upvotes: 3

sevilturner

Reputation: 71

In version 1.36.1 I tried to follow the steps mentioned in the previous answers and noticed that the Toggle Menu Bar has moved to a different location and has been renamed to Show Menu Bar. Follow these steps:

Press Alt to make menu visible
Click on the View menu, navigate to the Appearance option and choose Show Menu Bar

Upvotes: 4

S Wizard

Reputation: 21

You have two options.

Option 1

Make the menu bar temporarily visible.

press Alt key and you will be able to see the menu bar

Option 2

Make the menu bar permanently visible.

Steps:

Press F1
Type user settings
Press Enter
Click on the { } (top right corner of the window) to open settings.json file see the screenshot
Then in the settings.json file, change the value to the default "window.menuBarVisibility": "default" you can see a sample here (or remove this line from JSON file. If you remove any value from the settings.json file then it will use the default settings for those entries. So if you want to make everything to default settings then remove all entries in the settings.json file).