Sublime Forum

Minimap scroll behavior has some issues

#1

When clicking on the minimap you should be taken directly to the area in your code that you clicked. Instead it then functions as a scroll bar of sorts. This is really evident in extremely long files.

I see no value in the minimap if you can’t click a code ‘shape’ and be delivered to it. Am I missing something?

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#2

I agree—I avoid clicking on the minimap because it doesn’t work how I expect it to.

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#3

I also agree that this needs to be addressed. I find it very irritating every time I click the minimap. I often forget how useless clicking it is, and then I will click it only to be scrolled to some unrelated part of the code.

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#4

This was configurable in S1, and I believe most users preferred the current behavior there.

The alternate behavior, where clicking on text in the minimap takes you to that text, is more surprising for most people, as after clicking (in a large file) the view rectangle won’t be where the mouse cursor is.

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#5

It would probably be nice to have the option to do it both ways. It is kind of like having two scrollbars, they both do the same thing, but one is graphical, I can always use the scrollbar to scroll through the minimap, but it would be nice if the minimap gave some extra functionality except just an overview. I personally do not find it intuitive.

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#6

+1
I much prefer the ‘scroll to the clicked text’ behavior.

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#7

[quote=“jps”]This was configurable in S1, and I believe most users preferred the current behavior there.

The alternate behavior, where clicking on text in the minimap takes you to that text, is more surprising for most people, as after clicking (in a large file) the view rectangle won’t be where the mouse cursor is.[/quote]

Hey Jon, what about moving this “quick jump” behavior to middle clicks in scroll-bar (like linux apps do)? With this we could have the other behavior on minimap :smile:

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#8

It would be nice to have both, really, ctrl+click or *something * to go to the clicked code.

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#9

[quote=“jps”]This was configurable in S1, and I believe most users preferred the current behavior there.

The alternate behavior, where clicking on text in the minimap takes you to that text, is more surprising for most people, as after clicking (in a large file) the view rectangle won’t be where the mouse cursor is.[/quote]

I just saw a post on UserEcho that seemed like it had the potential to be really awesome:
sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/7 … ouse-over/

What if: when the mouse is at the top of the minimap, the minimap is scrolled so that it shows the top of the file, and when the mouse is at the bottom of the minimap, it’s scrolled to show the bottom of the file. Anywhere in between it’s scrolled proportionately. Now whenever you click it will both show the code you clicked on and put the view rectangle where the mouse cursor is. Could work!

Relatedly, when you click in the minimap, the line you click on is shown at the top of the view. Could it instead be centered in the view?

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Dev Build 2146
Nightly Build 2218
Dev Build 2146
Nightly Build 2218
#10

+1 (This would be perfect)

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#11

Yes, I agree… observed the same thing.

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#12

I understand why minimap works the way it does right now and changing it to work differently removes some counter-intuitive behavior but introduces a whole new set of artifacts.

What I noticed is that minimap behaves as expected when it fits within window’s height. So maybe adding an option “fit_minimap_to_window_height” (i.e. turning this *(http://i.imgur.com/mpasv.png)) is a solution that everyone was looking for?

I’m pretty sure I would trade a nice looking minimap with correct aspect-ratio for “click-to-show” behavior.*

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#13

The current functionality of the mini map is useless honestly. Its only functional in files that really don’t scroll hardly at all, and at that point I dont really use the scrollbar anyway. The functionality suggested earlier in this post (with a link to another site: sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/7 … ouse-over/) is brilliant. Mousing over the minimap would show the relative location of the cursor to the viewport to the map, so clicking on any area of the minimap would bring you directly there, also it would speed up looking through very long files since the mouseover would accelerate the minimap proportional to the viewport (to get to the bottom of the minimap for the file you would only need to move the cursor to the bottom of the screen)

Please add this! if not can we at least have a way to completely disable actions from clicking on the minimap?

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#14

I just want to echo the concerns… coming from a first time sublime user and first time minimap user, this is very un-intuitive. At least have a setting where this is configurable.

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#15

I wanted to use the minimap, and still do. But since I can’t click to go to a specific place, I just hide it and get on with life. I agree, it seems unintuitive on large files, and that seems to be the use-case where it is move valuable.

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#16

So I dug up a post where it was explained:

[quote]This means that if click-to-scroll was still implemented, I’d have to choose between one of two behaviours:

  • The view is scrolled to the text in the minimap that you clicked on. This would result in the orange view port representation not moving to where you click, which would likely be unexpected.
  • The view port is scrolled to where you click. This would result in in the text you clicked on in the minimap not being the text you now see in the main view, which would also be unexpected.[/quote]

It is my opinion that the first behavior is a hell of a lot more unexpected than the second one. Who cares if the highlighted area moves less than you expected it to? We want to go to where we click, not go to some place we can’t see.

I know this is really super-nitpicky, but the quality of Sublime is so high already as it is that the only things left to deal with are these nitpicky issues. And this one’s beginning to bother me a whole lot.

The only use case (that I do admit I do occasionally, since I can’t use it the other way) is to scroll around a document quickly across the entire document by scrubbing the minimap.

BUT I believe there is a way to reconcile this in such a way that only if you drag does it treat the vertical space as the full document. If you do a quick click on an area outside, it should definitely take you to where it was clicked. Repeating clicks in this fashion will let the highlight-block eventually reach that position after all. So which behavior it takes should depend on whether the click lands on the highlight or not. No Ctrl+click or right-click or any madness like that.

This will be reminiscent of scrollbar functionality which does page-up or page-down when clicking in the empty regions, except we have visual feedback and control. It’s actually perfect.

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#17

So let me summarize/revise the usability idea for the minimap a bit:

Click the highlighted area: Treat as full file scrollbar (exactly same as it is now)
Click anywhere outside the highlighted area: Warp to the exact location the mouse is over. For large files, this will NOT allow access to the whole file.

The rationale is that the highlighted area is always quite large. If you want to scrub across the whole file, all you have to do is start dragging by clicking the highlighted area. Clicking on the rest of the area, though, will now do something really useful, i.e. allow for precise higher-level navigation; it’s accelerated non-full scale scrubbing.

In addition to this, I think a really nice touch would also to be have different scroll wheel behavior: Scrolling while the mouse is over the minimap should scroll much faster than usual, this way you can navigate around a file and adjust the minimap’s location more easily (because it now requires clicking and dragging on the highlight in order to move very far).

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#18

I just saw this implemented in 2.0.2 (and I haven’t tested on 3 yet but I trust it will be there too :sunglasses: ) Love it!

This is giving me the warm and fuzzies. Thanks for paying attention, and keep up the great work!

I suggest the title of this thread be edited to indicate the behavior has been improved (to the point where I can’t see anything wrong with it, at least).

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#19

There is a new unwanted behavior.
Before using a mouse/finger had no difference.
Now using a finger I cannot drag the highlighted area in the minimap. I used to be able to drag this area and use it like a scroll bar. Now the entire screen is treated like the document itself where you can scroll by dragging the page. Very annoying…

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#20

49%20AM

Even with this option specified in the User Settings, the minimap_scroll_to_clicked_text does not work in my files. It DOES work with the read-only settings file displayed adjacent to my user settings, but nowhere else, even after restarting Sublime or the machine.

Mac HighSierra 10.13.6
Sublime Text Version 3.2.1 Build 3207

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