What's the function/use of hiding the sidebar on large screens if it does not extend the main content area?

UX
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Hey Discourse team. Sometime I’d like to extend the main content area horizontally, i.e. make it take more available width; and the intuitive way of doing so is to hide the left sidebar. As an example, that’s how it works in Gitlab, JetBrains IDEs, and multiple well known websites such as YouTube. The idea of making the sidebar collapsible itself kind of makes sense when you get something in return after collapsing it, otherwise what’s the deal?

I can see that on smalle screens the main content regains the space available. But why not on the bigger screens? It either should not be collapsible, or it should give something in return, and giving more space for the main content sounds as a reasonable ideal - at least to add as much space as was released by a hidden sidebar.

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There’s often not much benefit to more horizontal content on the screen, at one point it starts to make reading less efficient… Readability: The Optimal Line Length – Articles – Baymard Institute

At the moment I would say you gain focus when you hide the sidebar — the sidebar provides some light notifications when there is new content in various places, and this can be distracting for some people.

It’s also completely expected that the sidebar can be a “set it and forget it” feature — someone can toggle it on or off and never really think about it again. Though always interested to hear more perspectives on this.

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In technical communities (which there are many of who use Discourse) there is all sort of data that benefits from wider content areas, such as:

  • code snippets
  • logs
  • ascii documentation and charts
  • pdf and other file in-place preview

Current experience makes me pull my hair out as I have to scroll the content horizontally while seeing 20% unused space in my desktop monitor. It is literally an artificially created inability to use available space when it is needed that is very painful from the UX point of view.

These are not random decisions by the softwares/sites I listed above to make the space released by the sidebar taken by the content.

At least make it possible to “extend” and take all the space available except some aesthetic margins, e.g. via a hotkey.

Talking about staying focused… nothing distracts more than the need to scroll content horizontally as you try to read and comprehend it.

After all, it is a solvable problem: just keep the wrappable content’s width limited as it is now to keep it readable, but let unwrappable content take as much space as it is available.

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