Notebooks - Add support of minimap

[macsunmood]

Have to recreate this topic, since the previous issues were recursevly closed.
It would be great to have minimap support on Notebooks.

[rebornix]

We have this on our roadmap, thanks for sharing your interest on this. May I ask what you would expect from the Minimap for notebook? It would be great if you share what you wish to see on the roadmap, how to interact with it etc to help us better understand it (despite the technical challenge to make it happen)

[claudiaregio]

@rebornix Adding my thoughts here since I've wanted this for a long time 😛 I was hoping the minimap would also include mini versions of the rendered outputs so i could navigate to outputs that way. The outline/table of contents doesnt really cut it for this because I dont have a memorized mapping in my head of what output was under which markdown header.

[macsunmood]

We have this on our roadmap, thanks for sharing your interest on this. May I ask what you would expect from the Minimap for notebook? It would be great if you share what you wish to see on the roadmap, how to interact with it etc to help us better understand it (despite the technical challenge to make it happen)

@rebornix thanks for quick responce. See, Notebooks are usually really long which makes minimap an even more crucial feature than with regards to general code files. The basic functionality of minimap should be the same as one for regular files with code/text. But the great advantage which can be seen here - is to add combination of zoomed preview with rendered outputs (as @claudiaregio has already mentioned above, and also some nice approaches: #76586 (comment), #40048 (comment)) with some sort of integrated Table of Contents. How can such ToC be imagined/visualized? Just little shortcuts at/on the minimap border (could be bullets or triangles), which give a tooltip with the header title when hovering on them. These should of course be clickable, so that you can quickly navigate through the whole sheet.

If implemented, I believe this would improve the usability and navigation by orders of magnitude, significantly affecting productivity of work for all Data Science / Machine Learning practitioners.

Neither Jupyter Notebook, nor Google Colab have this feature as of now, and I can't think of any other currently existing app/service providing such functionality (well, I could be missing some).

[rebornix]

@macsunmood thanks for the detailed feedback. A short summary of what you and @claudiaregio mentioned:

• Table of contents (similar to how Xcode handles it)
• Mini version of outputs
• Zoom Preview

Including outputs in Minimap can be challenging (not low hanging and that's probably why no other editors experiment with this idea yet) but we can start from exploring showing markdown previews, code, and placeholders for outputs, and then offer easier preview and navigation of table of contents through the Minimap.

[macsunmood]

@rebornix
Can't the output be displayed in Minimap just schematically, with simple rendering, similar to the existing option for text? The main need is hotspot navigation, rendering quality plays no big role in this case. To be fair, I'm not familiar with how XCode handles ToC, as you've mentioned, but navigation of Table of Contents through the Minimap would be awesome!

[macsunmood]

@rebornix hi! Are there any updates on this ?

[rebornix]

Let's merge this issue in #115266. Thanks for all the input.