There is a sidebar widget. But it starts merged in the File Explorer view, and you need to drag it over from there to the sidebar to make it independent - https://stackoverflow.com/a/71522634

The widget is called "Timeline".

> The cool thing with IntelliJ is if you accidentally deleted a file you can just touch a blank version of the file and the history comes back. Not sure if VS Code does that yet.

VS Code does keep the history after file deletion, but I'm not sure how to access it from inside.

I had to manually rummage through the storage directory to find a file I accidentally deleted, but it was an file which was never saved (think Untitled), so it didn't had a path that I could try creating a blank file at.