How to hide and show the sidebar programmatically

Paul Hudson @twostraws December 1st 2022

Updated for Xcode 16.4

When using NavigationSplitView on macOS and iPadOS, SwiftUI lets us toggle showing the sidebar, content view, and detail view using the NavigationSplitViewVisibility enum.

This code sample shows all three variations:

struct ContentView: View {
    @State private var columnVisibility = NavigationSplitViewVisibility.detailOnly

    var body: some View {
        NavigationSplitView(columnVisibility: $columnVisibility) {
            Text("Sidebar")
        } content: {
           Text("Content")
        } detail: {
            VStack {
                Button("Detail Only") {
                    columnVisibility = .detailOnly
                }

                Button("Content and Detail") {
                    columnVisibility = .doubleColumn
                }

                Button("Show All") {
                    columnVisibility = .all
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Download this as an Xcode project

There are four modes to choose from:

In .detailOnly mode, the detail view will take up all the available screen space for your app.
In .doubleColumn mode, you’ll see both the content and detail views.
In .all mode, the system will attempt to show all three views if they exist. In the case where you don’t have a content view (the middle view), it will only show two.
In .automatic mode, the system will do what it thinks is best based on the current device and orientation.

Note: providing the columnVisibility is done using a binding because your value will automatically be updated as the user interacts with your UI.

Although SwiftUI uses different names for these three parts of our split view interface, they match up directly with UIKit counterparts: the sidebar is “primary” in UIKit, content is “supplementary”, and detail is “secondary”.

How to hide and show the sidebar programmatically

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