Show HN: Generate minimaps of your code | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Generate minimaps of your code

github.com

37 pointsIvoah16 comments

While I'm sure there's not much practical benefit to this, I am glad this exists.

Finally I can make my callback pyramid of doom t-shirt, generated from an actual pyramid of doom.

Nice work.

Minimaps make sense as a navigational aid in editors and IDEs, but what is the use case for command line tool that creates static minimap picture?

There really isn't much use for a tool like this. I mostly made it just to have fun with python and mess around with pygments. One possible use case could be for generating images for a website perhaps? It might be neat to have a minimap of the code of a website as its background.

An editor or IDE could shell out to an arbitrary minimap generator instead of incorporating it inside. Composition of small components, each doing one thing well.

This is a command line tool, not a library. It's not feasible to spawn python process 30+ times per second (during scrolling).

How about once to make a long bitmap image and then the IDE scrolls around in the image?

It would still have to regenerate the image every time you type something.

Because you're crazy and is not debouncing?

Free project idea: Upon reading the title, I imagined something that generates a minimap for the whole project, and files are laid out on the map according to how they relate to each other (the more tightly bound, the closer), so, for example, you could look at the "You are here" marker and see how far away from certain subsystems the current file is.

See https://github.com/fiatjaf/node-dependencies-view

Might want some -more- info in the README, as well as a license.

Just fleshed out the README a little, writing isn't one of my strong points.

Edit: just added a license too.

What am I looking at?

It's a condensed version of your code using color blocks instead of text.

The Sublime text editor used a similar view along the right side of the editor. You can use it to quickly navigate to a section of code without having to read each line.

I was inspired to make this by the minimap package for Atom, which is a copy of Sublime's behavior.

In case anyone cares, this is an option in Visual Studio too. Under "Text Editor > All Languages > Scroll Bars", you have the option to "Use map mode for vertical scroll bar". Can also be configured on a per-language basis.

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