Activity Bar width in Visual Studio Code

Not solving your exact question but another good solution...

Install the Customize UI extension.
In Settings (UI) go to the Customize UI settings and set Activity Bar to "bottom".
Completely close VSCode and reopen.

sidebar on bottom of vscode

I recommend the excellent extension Activitus Bar. It recreate the activity bar buttons on the status bar:

enter image description here

Then, you just hide this enormous, gigantic activity bar. Happying code!

EDIT (03/03/20): You can also use the customize-ui addon that allows more fine-grained font sizes and other goodies

You can also use the negative zoom trick in settings.json:

{
  "window.zoomLevel": -1,
  "editor.fontSize": 13,
  "terminal.integrated.fontSize": 16,
}

The whole editor will get smaller so you need to compensate editor.fontSize and terminal.integrated.fontSize

VSCode Zoom Level preview

This allows for smaller activity bar (unfortunately it acts on everything (icons size, font-size ...)) but I much prefer this than the defaults.

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