Activity bar: add setting to customize position

[nimo23]

Feature Description:

In VSCode, we can adjust the position of the Activity bar (for accessibility and/or preference reasons):

Please add this kind of setting in the Eclipse Theia Activity Bar as well. Actually, it is very inflexible to stick to only one position. It should be possible to set it at the top, right, left (default) or bottom.

[nimo23]

I'm trying to understand the backporting process from VSCode to Theia. Will this issue be (automatically) resolved after backporting the current VSCode to Theia?

As I understand it, Theia only uses (or extends) a small part of the VSCode project (e.g. the Monaco Editor but not the Monaco Workbench). In this case, the Monaco ActivityBar is a part of the Monaco Workbench.

Why, for example, doesn't it make sense to also use or extend the VSCode's "Monaco Workbench" and "Monaco Navigator Tree" instead of reimplementing them?

[msujew]

Hey @nimo23,

Theia is not a fork of VS Code, we essentially just use the Monaco editor from it. We use a modified version of the monaco-editor package, which comes without any VS Code features aside from the actual HTML-based editor. All other code is written by the Theia team.

The reason why we don't use any other of VS Code's source code is pretty simple: Flexibility. VS Code's workbench is pretty inflexible, with regards to overrides. I.e. you cannot simply subclass it and rebind it like in the Theia framework to adjust the behavior for your use case. That's how people build stuff like the Arduino IDE on top of the Theia framework.

Since we don't have any backporting process from VS Code, a feature such as this will be written from scratch specifically for our application shell infrastructure.