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Comment by santaclaus | Hacker News Reader

A minimap! This was one of the last remaining Sublime features that I missed.

Can someone explain the attraction of the minimap? It's something I turn off in any editor.

I can't rely on a postage stamp size picture of my code being unique enough between different parts of a file -- beyond perhaps the imports/constants/macros at the top, which you don't need help finding anyways.

ctrl-f or 'go to definition' has been enough.

I worked at a company that had some files that were thousands of lines long. The result of 10 years of entropy build up.

When you've worked with these files long enough, and it sounds kind of funny, but the shape of the code becomes very familiar. Searching for keywords though usually my primary method of finding places in code was sometimes less effective because it would occur multiple times (think function names) however I was intimately familiar with the shape of the code, so I could just jump to the 2 indented part.

A tree view of whatever you are working on would be more efficient to jump through parts of code, like Vim TagBar for instance. VSCore has Alt+O for symbols but I wish it had a tree view on the side of the editor.

You might think that, but someone else might think differently. It depends on whether you have a spatial sense of the code, or symbolic.

>A tree view of whatever you are working on would be more efficient to jump through parts of code, like Vim TagBar for instance.

Not if you are the visual type...

I like it for log and configuration files where I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for. Changes in shape often correlate with new sections.

It's everything a scroll bar does and more. Yea you can kind of get to know the structure of your code which is nice and sometimes when I open up a file and the mini-map is dense I already know I'm getting into a big file.

One of the most useful features for me (not sure if VS Code has this), but when I double-click/select a word, all other words with the same name are highlighted in the minimap. It's crazy useful for me, like a double-click/search/find all instances, it helps me jump around code very quickly.

Playing around with the minimap now, and disappointingly it doesn't seem to render the text selection (at least not at my dpi). Was looking forward to that as well.

If you haven't tried vscode however, it's always had selection markers inside the real scrollbar.

Hi eduren, I'm on the VS Code team. The minimap this release is just a preview focused on getting the performance aspects of it right. You can read about what's to come at the bottom of the minimap section https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_10#_preview-minimap

Tyriar, thanks SO much for minimap! I use multiple editors. I mark up some of my files with designs that can be seen from a "high altitude" minimap view, and I've had to use a different editor for those files until now. With minimap, I can also edit those files with VSCode and eliminate one other editor.

I hope you'll add a variety of preferences for it, so users can decide for themselves how much "weight" they want to bear and for which features. I'd like to be able to toggle it on/off, have it show highlights, keep the viewport highlighted even when the mouse is not in the minimap, and adjust the width (sometimes I have more room, sometimes I have a VERY long file, etc.).

SEPARATE ISSUE: I wish the "Panel" (output, terminal, etc.) could be positioned side-by-side with the code instead of being fixed on the bottom, where it covers up half of your code while leaving the right side of the screen empty.

I tried using minimap in other editors and it just got in my way. Tick marks have always been far more useful to me. At a glance I see if there are other occurrences of a term in the entire file. With minimap, I have to scroll to find what I want.

Now if we can just get Sublime-like Project folders that read settings from custom JSON (currently VSCode's #1 most requested issue on Github) I don't think there's any huge features I'll miss

There's a Project Manager extension I use (https://github.com/alefragnani/vscode-project-manager/blob/m...) that's pretty good for this - replaced Sublime projects for me.

I'm already using this but somehow missed that you could configure it that way! Hah, thanks

i wonder if they're forced to run the highlighter on a huge range now instead of restricting it to viewport.

has this affected perf?

I'd imagine the highlighter wouldn't optimize for viewable area except for abnormally large files. Highlighter probably runs for the full file.

Also, doesn't it need the context of the full file for proper syntax awareness?

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/02/08/syntax-highli...

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