Visual Studio Code: GUI

Containers

Visual Studio code's has five containers:

Editor	Edit files
Side Bar	Contains views such as the Explorer
Status Bar	Shows information about the current project and/or the files being edited
Activity Bar	Switch between views (in the Side Bar?), contains addtional context specific information such as forexample the number of outgoing changes (when Git is enabled). Locagted on the left side of the GUI
Panels	Used for debug, error and warning output, or as an integrated terminal.

Items are shown within a container.

Items include

View Container	Existing view containers include: File Explorer, Source Control (SCM) and Debug view containers.
View	Content that is shown in the Side Bar or in a Panel.
View Toolbar
Sidebar Toolbar
Editor Toolbar
View Container
Panel Toolbar
Status Bar Item

Further GUI elements include

Minimap which is basically a code outline.
Command Palette which allows to run tasks and commands. (Can be opened with ctrl+shift+p or F1).
Notifications to display breif information
Scrollbars (configurable using the settings editor.scrollbar.…: ….horizontal, ….vertical, ….horizontalScrollbarSize,….verticalScrollbarSize, ….scrollByPage)

There are three types of notifications:

In Zen mode, VS Code shows only one editor and hides all other GUI elements. This supposedly helps a programmer to focus on editing the code.

Zen mode is entered with the keyboard shortcut ctrl+k z and left with double pressing esc.

The keyboard shortcut ctrl+0 moves focus to the Side Bar, ctrl+1 to the Editor.