[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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-07-17 23:00 UTC)