[HN Gopher] A Firefox-only minimap (2021)
___________________________________________________________________
A Firefox-only minimap (2021)
Author : sph
Score : 614 points
Date : 2023-07-17 12:44 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.stefanjudis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.stefanjudis.com)
| jchw wrote:
| It also doesn't show up on Fennec F-Droid, even in Desktop mode,
| but maybe that's just because I can't get the width to be big
| enough for it to trigger. Looks great on Librewolf!
|
| Of course, browsers will never be fully at parity with each-other
| until they're all based on Chrome, so it's no surprise there are
| the occasional features that are just easier to implement in one
| browser than the other... though this one just seems kind of
| wild, I'll be honest.
| danShumway wrote:
| I can see the use, but this is also kind of wild. It's live-
| updating if you select text, it's almost literally a separate
| viewport into the same content.
|
| I'm trying to figure out the use-cases and implications of this.
| You can do offscreen/overflow:hidden tricks to make it work with
| hidden elements. But... as far as I know there's still no way
| without a library to convert that element to an image (for
| privacy reasons I suspect).
|
| I'm sorry for kind of being all over the place, but the MDN page
| is pretty short and I have a lot more questions. I guess I could
| always apply CSS filters and distortion directly to elements,
| does this being treated like a background open up possibilities
| there? It's the first time I'm hearing about this even though
| it's been around for a while, and I wouldn't have suspected this
| would be a CSS feature even on the table. How useful is this
| beyond just cloning viewports (assuming I'm only targeting
| Firefox and don't care about Chrome)?
| sakex wrote:
| Could be used for a lot of cool things, like a mirror, a
| magnifying glass, keeping a part of the page in view even if it
| is outside of the screen (for editing purposes for instance),
| I'm sure I'm missing many other use cases. None of them
| fundamentally useful but cool in their own ways.
| danShumway wrote:
| The tricky bit here is that it's not going to do things like
| forward events, so using this to keep the page in view won't
| allow selecting text for example. For some things like the
| mimimap here, that seems like a feature? You want it to be
| purely visual in that case.
|
| For other cases, I'm not sure if I should think of that as a
| feature or a limitation. Definitely something to play around
| with though.
| sakex wrote:
| Yes but you could make a change at the top of the page that
| would have an impact at the bottom, and that would be
| useful to see both changes at the same time.
| lexicality wrote:
| The minimap is cute, but more entertaining to me is the
| screensaver that kicks in after 3 minutes of leaving the tab
| idle.
|
| I'm glad there's still whimsy on the web
| stefanjudis wrote:
| Haha, glad that my screensaver sparks some joy. :)
| ryandrake wrote:
| Why have a "minimap" if your content itself is already the size
| of a minimap? I have a 27" monitor, and this site's content takes
| up a ~5 inch strip down the center of my browser, with 9 inches
| on each side full of whitespace. Over 75% of the page is
| whitespace. If you let the content grow to fill the browser
| window, you could read the whole thing without scrolling.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Every day I hit sites that literally only work in Chrome.. it's
| time to fight back :)
| williamdclt wrote:
| I exclusively use firefox, have a pretty normal browsing
| pattern, and that almost never happens to me! Much less that
| once a month, maybe once every 3 months
| treyd wrote:
| I simply refuse to use websites if they require Chrome. I
| find some other way to do whatever it is I'm trying.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| One factor I've found is the intersection of Enhanced
| Tracking Protection and Multi-Account Container in Firefox.
| I'm seeing daily "Please stop using an ad blocker, Firefox is
| an ad blocker, please use Chrome, this site works best in
| Chrome" banners and ad walls and paywalls and other similar
| cranky anti-patterns.
|
| It fascinates me how many people I know have uBlock (Origin)
| installed in Chrome and see nowhere near as many whiny
| banners and "stop running an ad blocker" nonsense as I see
| running Firefox without an ad blocker just ETP and MAC. The
| people complaining "Firefox is an ad blocker" are making it
| clear that they don't actually care that you are blocking ads
| or not, they care that you are blocking trackers and hate you
| for trying to maintain a semblance of privacy. Keeps saying
| the quiet parts out loud.
|
| Most of the sites that do that are a "close tab and ignore"
| thing, some are a sequester to their own account container
| and feed them garbage (create a dumb account for them, turn
| off ETP just for them just in that container). It is still
| only a once-a-month case where such a site I need to get
| something done on is entirely broken in Firefox and I need to
| open it in something Chromium based, but that's still too
| often and getting worse.
|
| But that "Firefox is an ad blocker, please use a less private
| browser" is a daily annoyance for me for sure.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Similar for me, I'd say it's actually more like once or twice
| a year. More if you count sites that are specifically about
| Chrome experiments, which sometimes get linked from HN.
| larrik wrote:
| Same
|
| For whatever reason car manufacturers are the worst at it.
| Microsoft is also pretty bad (worse than Google).
| jorvi wrote:
| Logging into PSN was (is?) broken for a very, very long time.
| It was for at least 1.5 year, but I switched after that so I
| couldn't tell beyond that.
| iends wrote:
| Finding one once every few months sound about right but
| usually the bugs impacting Firefox users are major PITA. Some
| I've had over the past few years:
|
| * myADP had some kind of bug preventing firefox
| authentication that lasted months.
|
| * Elan financial redid their credit card site for fidelity
| visa and had a CSS bug that hid the card total balance. This
| lasted for about a month.
|
| * bitbucket (work required) had this bug that prevented pages
| rendering in firefox. It was some kind of JS client side bug
| and it impacted a bunch of people in my company. After months
| of support request they gave us some console commands that
| opted into an experimental feature which resolved the issue.
| This one was especially frustrating as they kept telling us
| to just clear our cookies and delete our profiles.
|
| * Some random IRS system I had to use for either requesting a
| tax transcript or validating my identity just didn't work.
|
| It's actually been so frustrating my coworkers joke anytime
| there is a bug I'm experiencing that it must be another
| Firefox only bug.
| isanjay wrote:
| Opening fastmail in Firefox crashes the whole browser. I
| don't know why. I stopped my subscription due to that.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| I have used fastmail in Firefox daily for years, never
| had an issue.
| isanjay wrote:
| Well maybe it only happens for me. Not only the page
| becomes non responsive the whole browser becomes non
| responsive.
| danShumway wrote:
| Yeah, something is going on with GP's browser. I have
| Fastmail open in Firefox right now, I've never had an
| issue with it.
|
| I'm not saying that to dismiss the problem, I believe GP
| that it's crashing; more bringing it up to say "there is
| something going wrong here that's not at the browser/site
| level that could potentially be fixable for you on your
| local device if you want to use Fastmail in Firefox."
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| vanguard's website can't edit holdings with firefox. I
| reported it years ago and literally nothing's been done.
| aembleton wrote:
| I've never had a problem on their UK site [1]. It might
| be a different code base.
|
| 1. https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/
| politelemon wrote:
| > myADP
|
| For years they had a terrible implementation that only
| worked in _old_ versions of IE. They had no incentive to
| change because they were the main players in that space. I
| loathed them because their tagline was "Anytime, anywhere"
| which was clearly missing an asterisk.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Normally it's something else, like a plugin. To be honest I
| don't notice much, frequently I assume it's some tracking
| that's blocked which courses the site to not function and
| just move on.
|
| Between blocking tracking, with DuckDuckGos privacy plugin,
| and using Firefox I'd say that blocking tracking breaks
| WAAAAY more sites.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| Agreed. I regularly have to do a little "disable for site"
| dance with uBO and Privacy Badger to even get certain
| websites to load. It's kind of convenient in that it gives
| me an inflection point where I can choose not to use that
| website or service at all.
| krylon wrote:
| I recently installed adguard on my home server, and it did
| indeed break a few sites.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| The times it does happen I've found more often than not
| switching the user agent fixes it...
| jjice wrote:
| Yeah it's upsetting the sites that I run into this on,
| especially since there's no excuse in 2023. On more obscure
| pages on Vanguard's website I've run into some broken stuff
| that results in console errors I don't remember, but switching
| to Chrome made it work :/
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| yeah the edit holdings page is broken in FF
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't think I've come across that yet with Firefox.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Speaking of that, I've had issues with Firefox (both on Mac and
| Linux) where some checkboxes just don't appear. I was checking
| in for an international flight last month on American, and
| could not manage to get through the checkin process until I
| discovered there was a checkbox I needed to tick that didn't
| even appear on Firefox (but which did on Chrome)..
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Yes. It reminds me of when there were rumours/(facts?) about
| open source sabotaging of FF. I see a lot of instances where
| pages worked fine on FF but now they don't, and sometimes I
| have to fire up another browser. I really hope that's not the
| case.
|
| I use FF by default.
| cornedor wrote:
| Is this a geographically local thing? This happens very rarely
| to me, although I there are some (Google) sites I use regularly
| that do work worse on Firefox than Chrome.
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| I mean, the article is good but no one is talking about that
| incredible screensaver. I opened like 10 links from HN and when I
| finally opened this tab there it was waiting for me.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Wow I had never heard of element()!
|
| Along similar lines, HyperCard had a lockScreen flag that would
| stop sending draw commands to the screen, and instead buffer them
| internally, so that the screen would update once drawing was
| finished. It's such a powerful abstraction that much of the hand-
| waving we do today to avoid redraw would just go away, including
| nearly all of the effort that goes into building single-page
| applications (SPAs), because their functionality can be simulated
| by simply locking the screen and fetching new HTML from the
| server as a dumb terminal so the loading bar doesn't animate:
|
| https://www.hypercard.center/HyperTalkReference/lockScreen
|
| <rant>
|
| To a first-order approximation, all apps/libraries/frameworks are
| missing critical functionality like this. The most common design
| mistake is to provide a setter without a getter, or vice versa.
| Another one is for a console app to provide a config file
| setting, with no way to override that as a shell argument to the
| executable. There are dozens, if not hundreds of these common
| anti-patterns, so statistically the odds of any piece of software
| having any of one of them can be considered to be 100%.
|
| So in this case, most "modern" browsers provide a way to render
| the screen image from an HTML description, but no way to retrieve
| that image. The canvas element is a band-aid over these original
| design mistakes. A proper DOM implementation would look like
| iframes (windows) all the way down, where the contents could be
| specified from url, attributes, html, vectors/buffers or code.
| Each would have its own sandbox attributes defaulting to full
| isolation, so could be treated as its own browser, then their
| data dependencies could be piped together, a bit like unix
| executables. Mashups/portals/aggregators would be so easy to
| build that kids would be doing it.
|
| It's a serious enough problem that honestly I don't really think
| in terms of HTML/CSS/Javascript anymore. I work in tables
| mentally, then let the designers transpile that description to
| CSS. And the real work of building the rich interactions
| available in desktop programming simply can't be done without
| massive yak shaving. This was also a problem in OpenGL before
| better access to render buffers and shaders went mainstream.
|
| IMHO this all started when Netscape became a private enterprise
| from its Mosaic roots, then was exacerbated when Microsoft
| monopolized the browser market for so many years, then cemented
| when Firefox and Chrome endorsed the status quo. The only way out
| now would probably be to formally build a programmer's browser
| from scratch with hard security constraints around the core
| element's external communication, then emulate the current
| HTML/CSS/Javascript experience we're used to. Sort of like Qt,
| Postscript, etc. Which of course will never happen, so it's hard
| to see the positive in discussing these foundational decisions
| when there's nothing any of us can do to fix them in any
| reasonable amount of time/money/effort.
| bogwog wrote:
| This would be cool to have for an online code editor or similar,
| but otherwise I hate these types of custom navigation things on
| websites.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Honestly I didn't notice it until it was pointed out by the
| article. Banner blindness has done a number on me.
|
| Pretty cool thing here, just wish I could use it to navigate.
| That's the biggest reason why I keep a minimap on in VS Code.
| paddy_m wrote:
| It would be nice if the page defined what a minimap is?
| jessfyi wrote:
| I always liked Lars Jung's implementation where the text is
| abstracted into blocks (which works on chrome) [0][1] and Rauno
| Freiberg's demo (uses -moz-element) where you can use it to pin
| sections, jump between them, and navigate the page in general
| [2].
|
| [0] https://larsjung.de/pagemap/ [1]
| https://larsjung.de/pagemap/latest/demo/text.html [2]
| https://uiw.tf/minimap
| iib wrote:
| Is there any bookmarklet to add this to another arbitrary page? I
| can't seem to make it work, even with modifying the CSS code.
| zeta0134 wrote:
| And since it is positioned and looks like the Sublime Text
| minimap, I instinctively tried to click on it to scroll to part
| of the page, and was saddened that this does not work. That would
| be the most logical extension, that feature is _really_ cool in
| general.
| dark__paladin wrote:
| For what it's worth, Vivaldi has the option to generate minimaps
| for whatever page you're on:
|
| https://help.vivaldi.com/android/android-appearance/page-act...
| CAP_NET_ADMIN wrote:
| I've been using Firefox for the past year due to some weird
| incompatibility between my GPU and Chrome's video decoding. It
| caused dropped frames and caused my YT quality to go down.
|
| Haven't really noticed any issues on Firefox except the lack of
| actually good web translator.
|
| -moz-element looks sweet, hope it comes to other browsers.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| I have been using Firefox ever since Opera bit the dust, but I
| have been trying, so hard, to use Vivaldi the last 3-6 months,
| mostly because it offers a portable version out of the box that
| discovers profiles just by looking at folders, i.e. super sweet
| for syncing.
|
| But it's such a dog. Even after turning off mail and feeds
| which just sit there eating CPU like candy, I just can't make
| it fast, and returning to and cleaning up my Firefox made it so
| snappy, I'd rather stick to my 3 profiles (normal,dev, media)
| and do the rest via Bookmarks. And for all the sweet UI options
| and configurability Vivaldi has, with Tree Style Tabs and some
| addons for it, and hacking the UI CSS, I am sheepishly making
| Firefox my primary again, pretending none of that happened.
|
| I wish it cached compiled WebGL shaders though. That is the
| only thing where Chrome beats it to a pulp sadly. Maybe there
| are config tweaks, I haven't looked into it, but out of the box
| reloading a page with a lot of shaders is basically instant in
| Chrome, even on mobile, and can take ages on FF, depending on
| the shaders.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Looks like that intro paragraph is going to need an update =)
| spankalee wrote:
| element() would be amazing for things like making thumbnails of
| slides in a presentation app.
| EspressoGPT wrote:
| What a shame that it doesn't seem to work recursively.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| That's the same thing I immediately had to try as well :)
|
| The argument of -moz-element() can be a child of the styled
| element, but it can't be a parent (makes sense).
| miohtama wrote:
| With Firefox and CSS background you can open a portal to
| another dimension
| jcarrano wrote:
| Yes it can- that's the first thing I tried- but it will not
| iterate forever. The trick is to use indirect recursion:
| <div id="a"></div> <div id="b"></div> #a,
| #b { height: 200px; width: 200px;
| border: dashed; } #a { background: -moz-
| element(#b) no-repeat; background-size: 80%;
| border-color: green; } #b { background:
| -moz-element(#a) no-repeat; background-size: 80%;
| border-color: purple; }
| sph wrote:
| This is utter madness. I love it.
| kevingadd wrote:
| It's impressive how well the minimap works for bigger articles, I
| clicked around randomly and ended up at
| https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/should-responsive-images-w...
| and the minimap feels slightly magical since it appears instantly
| and updates synchronously if I do things like select text.
|
| It feels kind of disappointing that I can't interact with it to
| scroll around like in i.e. Sublime Text, but I imagine that's a
| little harder to do as the author of a website. It's still very
| cool to me that you can do something like this on the web, and I
| wonder how much work it would be to support this complex CSS
| feature in Chrome or Safari.
| taink wrote:
| Weirdly enough I can't see it on this article but it's showing
| just fine on the OP. Maybe my extensions?
| stefanjudis wrote:
| Site author here: there's some logic to only show the minimap
| when there's enough screen estate and it generally fits.
|
| Couldn't be bothered to scrolling/dragging logic. :D
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| It should definitely take a responsive design into account,
| I think. The beauty is that most sites, on desktop at
| least, should be able to benefit -- we all have plenty of
| horizontal real-estate to spare!
| cal85 wrote:
| Crazy that `element()` has been fully supported (with `-moz-`) in
| Firefox since 2011 while no other browsers seem to even partially
| support it [0]. I can think of a few powerful use cases (not just
| minimaps) if this had cross browser support.
|
| Does anyone connected to the Chrome or Webkit teams have any idea
| why? Is there a lack of interest, is it hard to implement with
| good performance, does it create any tricky security issues?
|
| [0] https://caniuse.com/css-element-function
| judah wrote:
| Chromium-based browsers have -webkit-box-reflect [0], which
| does some of the things that element() does.
|
| Specifically, it does reflections of elements. That's really
| the big use case for -moz-element IMO.
|
| [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/-webkit-
| box...
| masswerk wrote:
| For me on FF 115.0.2 (64-bit), the "how it looks like" pane was
| stuck, and only revealed on mouse-over what is instantly visible
| on Safari Desktop. On reload, the same state is still visible for
| a short period, before it's replaced by the intended content
| ("Screen_Shot_2021-10-17_at_21.45.35.png" - hey, built on
| FF/macOS!). This is also repeatable (and somewhat ironic.)
| mcbutterbunz wrote:
| Would be interesting to see how this worked on infinite scroll
| sites.
| dmotz wrote:
| A decade ago I built a silly JS library for folding up DOM
| elements like paper [1] and I eagerly anticipated using element()
| instead of tediously cloning nodes for every fold. Here we are
| ten years later and this niche CSS feature has yet to be adopted
| by the other browsers. Similarly, I thought I'd soon be using the
| CSS custom filter spec from the same era (which allows custom
| GLSL shaders to be applied to elements), but it also has yet to
| pick up traction.
|
| [1] https://oridomi.com
| danShumway wrote:
| My understanding was that browser makers looked at the CSS
| custom filter spec and decided they were too difficult to
| implement securely[0].
|
| On one hand, I definitely appreciate that, I'm glad to see a
| feature abandoned if it's being abandoned because it's
| impossible to do it safely. On the other hand... I wanted CSS
| custom filters _so much_ and I still regularly think of things
| I could have done with them :)
|
| [0]: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-
| dev/2014-January/0...
| autoexec wrote:
| There's already enough problems with CSS and what it can do
| that I want an add-on which either disables it entirely, or
| allows only a tiny subset of it.
|
| I can appreciate a clever use of CSS the same way I can with
| JS but for my day to day browsing I don't want either being
| able to do whatever it wants because far too often what
| websites use it for is user-hostile.
| danShumway wrote:
| CSS shaders are the kind of feature that I would get a ton
| of use out of for specific projects, and would also very
| likely either turn off entirely or at least put behind a
| permission in my own personal browser.
|
| I get why they're likely a bad idea, I'm not saying they
| _should_ be implemented. It 's very likely the right
| decision to get rid of them. I just mean... I want them XD
| tiagod wrote:
| Wish this was an extension. I like it. Maybe it will be my next
| project.
| aendruk wrote:
| In case anyone else had trouble finding it, the minimap is only
| displayed if the viewport width was >=1120px when the page was
| initially loaded.
| CursedUrn wrote:
| This seems like something that would be heavily abused by sites
| that deliberately try to break basic browser functionality (like
| being able to right click images, or select text). If they render
| the whole page as a background image, you'll no longer be able to
| inspect, save, translate, etc. any of the content. That's just
| the first thing I thought of, I imagine there's all sorts of
| nefarious ways to screw over the reader with this function.
| cal85 wrote:
| I agree it feels like something that could be abused, but not
| with the example you've given. It already only takes a tiny bit
| of CSS or JS to do those things you mentioned; no need to do
| anything complex with element canvases. So the reason that most
| websites _don 't_ do those things cannot be that they don't
| have the ability. It is because they do not, in fact, have the
| inclination, and that's because there is an economic punishment
| for having a shitty website: people will start using your
| competitors instead. (Caveat: this doesn't work out in areas
| that aren't free markets, like company intranet portals, badly
| run local council sites etc, which is why those kinds of sites
| tend to have more user-hostile stuff.) In general it is a
| mistake to think that we need to purposefully hamstring website
| operators to make the standard of websites higher: the opposite
| is true.
| throwthrow41 wrote:
| So you can render a tree of elements into a background? I'm
| guessing you can't then get that raster image back out? I would
| love to be able to get my webpages as images.
| berkes wrote:
| That's slightly harder, but still possible by first rendering
| the HTML onto a canvas.
|
| Example here: http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/
| tiagod wrote:
| Here's the adoption matrix for CSS element():
| https://caniuse.com/css-element-function
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I would be ok with it if we started seeing "works best with
| firefox" instead of chrome/edge.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| What am I supposed to see here? I'm using Firefox on Linux. All I
| see is a normal blog article about something called a minimap,
| but I fail to see any such minimap. Disabling the ad blocker
| didn't help. What am I missing?
| jacknews wrote:
| Not working for me on macos.
|
| otoh firefox has been really weird since the 115 update - rock
| solid before that, but now all kinds of weird graphic glitches
| and hangs.
| _joel wrote:
| Working fine here for me on macos, latest FF, uBlock enabled
| jacknews wrote:
| ok, it works in private mode, so must be one of my plugins
| - maybe vimium.
|
| Anyway this is definitely cool, but it's a shame you can't
| use it as a scrollbar.
| taink wrote:
| There should be a picture of what you are supposed to see on
| the article[1]. It works on this page for me but some of the
| other articles do not show it. Seems weird because I'm not
| changing browsers in between.
|
| [1]
| https://images.ctfassets.net/f20lfrunubsq/2FuQMHycwersLjIf4d...
| drewg123 wrote:
| Look in the upper right side. There is a mini snapshot of the
| page, with a blue outline showing the portion of the page that
| the browser can see. When you highlight text on the page, you
| can see it highlighted in the minimap.
| oblio wrote:
| There's a minimap-type scroll bar for the article to the right.
| There's an image in the article of how it looks.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this remains unimplemented for security reasons.
| Other apis that would let you render part of the page to an image
| are similarly blocked. We ran into this a lot when working on
| WebXR.
| keithxm23 wrote:
| It would be super cool if this was implemented as a firefox
| plugin!
| RandomWorker wrote:
| The first thing I do when I work in an editor with a mini-map is
| -- turn it off. I find it mostly the most useless feature for
| coding, and for sites it seems to be equally useless. Why?
|
| 1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or
| navigating.
|
| 2. Short or long pages, both don't really benefit from the loss
| of screen real-estate. Or the distraction really.
|
| 3. Other tools like a proper index with descriptive headers, or
| the search function work so much better to navigate the page.
|
| Where mini-maps could be awesome are large images, or maps. They
| tend to visual in nature, and when zoomed in you can look at the
| mini-map to see where you are in the whole. Which is useful.
|
| So, cool future, but this doesn't really seem like a great
| implementation.
| ilyt wrote:
| I can only think about one use, skipping the image/advertising
| bullshit but then those pages won't put minimap up exactly for
| that reason.
| predmijat wrote:
| You can use `figlet` to create banners which are readable in
| the minimap.
| sharikous wrote:
| I am in your camp but to my surprise I met a lot of people who
| love them so I can understand why editors include minimaps
| these days.
|
| After the spaces vs tabs war calmed down let's see what will be
| the aftermath of the minimap invasion
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I do the exact opposite.
|
| I use the minimap a lot, as a much better scrollbar. I tend to
| work on long files and even if I am rarely looking directly at
| the minimap, it is in my field of view and I often
| subconsciously glance at it.
|
| This kind of feature is clearly no one-size0-fits-all, but it
| would be a mistake to consider it is useless because you don't
| like it.
| iKlsR wrote:
| Same, also in vscode disable the text rendering (which is
| actually useless), increase the block sizes (shape of the
| code) and you can recognize bits of your code easily.
| danShumway wrote:
| I will say that I kind of love minimaps. I don't think that
| they should be required and I absolutely get why you'd want to
| turn them off, they take up a ton of space. If you're splitting
| files more often I could also see it getting really annoying.
|
| But I think of code very visually and spatially and I don't
| split files until I have to, so it does help me quickly
| navigate to be able to sort of see the "shape" of a file and to
| be able to quickly jump around in it, especially if the file is
| divided into clear sections. Mostly just personal preference,
| and I agree they should never be mandatory.
|
| And agreed on the large images/maps, most image editors have a
| viewport feature like that and it's pretty useful when doing
| detail work.
| dralley wrote:
| >1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or
| navigating.
|
| It's for looking at the shape of the code, not the contents.
| Also VSCode for example will show errors visibly highlighted in
| red in the minimap as well, which makes them easier to navigate
| to.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| VS Code's also shows:
|
| - (Linter) Warnings (in most themes a yellow or orange), like
| compile errors
|
| - Marks for recently edited sections of code (in most themes
| a blue). Those marks are also shown in the left hand gutter
| beside lines but I think they are sometimes too subtle there,
| but their mini-map counterparts are less subtle.
|
| - Current global search results (a bright gray or sometimes
| yellow, depending on theme)
|
| - Current file search results (a slightly different gray)
|
| - Current "active token" search results (another gray), such
| as when you put the cursor mid-word and VS Code naturally
| highlights all the other uses of that word
|
| - Indicators for all of the lines containing your cursors
| when using multi-cursor (Alt+click to add additional
| cursors), which can be very useful to watch in large files
| with a bunch of shared refactors spread out over some
| distance
|
| That's just off the top of my head because I use _all_ of
| those to navigate some source documents.
|
| I think one of the "shape of the code" things not everyone
| appreciates as well is that some languages create more
| interesting shapes than others. There are some languages
| where every file creates a very similar looking waterfall and
| there are others where the landmarks are much more obvious.
| Ironically it is sometimes the _worst_ languages that have
| the most visually distinguishable shapes and where I find I
| appreciate the minimap most of all. You can visually see
| sections that began as copied and pasted duplicates, you can
| see the places where lines are highly repetitive and often
| those correspond to key patterns of very explicit landmarks (
| "there's the save code, you can tell because all the field
| string names are on the left side of assignments; there's the
| load code, you can tell because all the field string names
| are on the right side of assignments"). You can't make out
| the individual words, but you can certainly see those
| "blocks" like that from that "ten thousand foot view".
|
| There's probably a visual processing/pattern matching thing
| about minimaps in general that some people have an easier
| time with than others. I've always liked a good map,
| regardless of context, so minimaps have always seemed useful
| to me. Map reading is a large combination of subtle skills,
| and I have just enough childhood training and natural
| aptitude that I have a great baseline for just about any map.
| I appreciate not everyone has those same skills, especially
| not in the weird arrangement that I do.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Marking recent / uncommitted additions and deletions to your
| code, and linter errors / warnings, so you can jump right down
| to them - is super useful, especially if you just changed one
| little thing amongst a pack of similar little things. You can
| jump back and forth between two trouble points in code with a
| single click, and without having to remember anything.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I think minimaps _can_ also be great at improving on the
| 'preview' function of the classic scrollbar they iterate on. A
| scrollbar can tell me how long a page is and, therefore, give
| me an idea of whether I want to continue reading or not. But a
| minimap can help to differentiate between the "short article
| followed by pages of comments I can ignore" case and the
| "article far too long to even bother with" one.
| mgaunard wrote:
| It's useful when you search, since you can see where all the
| matches are distributed in the document at a glance.
| eek2121 wrote:
| I leave it on. It acts as a larger scrollbar when I use the
| mouse/trackpad/whatever pointing device to scroll. Operating
| systems these days are all about hiding the scrollbar and/or
| making it as small as possible. The minimap not only solves
| that issue, but also gives a bit of a visual representation of
| the file contents. Sure, you can't read the text, but if you've
| worked with a file long enough, you know exactly what you are
| looking at.
| behnamoh wrote:
| I disable it. I like vsc to be minimal like vim. I even use
| Vim extensions which help me avoid using scroll bar and use
| crtl-D/u/e/y instead.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I just use the scroll wheel / touch pad, especially the one
| on Apple's mouse is really intutive. But I also try to not
| have my files get too large, or use the search function to
| quickly scroll to somewhere I know.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I think probably most of us use the scroll wheel (or
| equivalent) to scroll, but the advantage of the visible
| scroll bar is the immediate feedback of both document
| length and current location.
| recursive wrote:
| I do all that. But sometimes I find myself editing a file I
| did not create. Sometimes that file is large. Actually,
| that seems to happen a lot.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Isn't it funny that scrollbars are deemed too space-wasting
| to make a reasonable size anymore, but there's plenty of
| space for nonsense like minimaps?
|
| Bring back actual scrollbars! Or at least make it possible to
| turn them on.
| sangriafria wrote:
| The irony is that the future of scrollbars, especially with
| narrow webpages and wide monitors, could have been
| minimaps. But instead we got disappearing scrollbars and
| reading indicators...
| silon42 wrote:
| It's closer to proper width of the scrollbar than many modern
| ones :)
| Sharlin wrote:
| I don't use minimaps either, but I guess their utility much
| depends on what kind of documents you're editing. For
| programming languages where code is mostly structured inside
| functions, the "structure" view listing the types and functions
| in the file seems much more useful, as well as quick-search
| based on name and similar features.
|
| But if the content is, say, HTML, or LaTeX, or a Word document,
| then I can see a visual representation being more useful. It
| would be interesting to know if there's some correlation
| between people liking/disliking minimaps and the type of
| content they tend to view/edit.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think it's more useful for diffs or when you have
| search/match patterns that can differentiate by color.
| Especially in longer/bigger files.
| keithxm23 wrote:
| A lot depends on your use-case and the kind of website you're
| using this on.
|
| I would find this very useful on a site like Wikipedia where I
| often know the section I want to jump to before landing on the
| page. (e.g. I want to see the number of goals Messi has scored
| each season at Barcelona and I know there's always a table at
| the bottom of most wiki articles regarding historical stats for
| soccer-players). I could see from the mini-map where the tables
| are jump straight to it.
|
| Like you said, the the text is too small to make out where
| you're going or navigating. But most often I find myself
| visiting sites that I've visited in the past and for those I
| have a good mental image of what the page already looks like. I
| can use the hints from a minimap to jump to the relevant
| section of the page.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| For longer documents, especially with multiple different blocks
| like code or images, it seems to be actually useful. It gives a
| fast impression on the length of the site, where you are and
| where the interesting and boring landmarks might be. But this
| also demand that the content is centered, and hos enough free
| space on the side, which is not that uncommon these days.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| When I first encountered mini-maps (in Sublime Text, which I
| still use), I just thought it was just a gimmick that looked
| cool, but that's about it.
|
| Now, I use it all the time, that's essentially a better scroll
| bar. In fact, the moment I saw the mini-map on the linked
| websites, I instantly tried to use it as a scrollbar, and was
| very disappointed to see that it didn't work.
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