Minimap: Show Full Document

[rickvanprim]

Love that minimap has been added to VC Code! I'd like to request an option for it to work similar to Visual Studio where it takes up the entire vertical spaces always and does not scroll. I like being able to see/select my absolute position in the document (even if the code is very compressed), as opposed to just having a zoomed out view of the code that doesn't encompass the entire document.

[pankajpatel]

Sounds good idea. Though the aspect ratio of the minimap will change always on the basis of the number of lines in the file.

This feature should be available as a configurable option for minimap as scrolling or fixed minimap.

[mralexivy]

Adding comparison image of VSCode minimap vs Visual Studio displaying the same file:

[alexdima]

We have analysed this when implementing the minimap. We've found the Visual Studio approach lacking for large files. At one point, e.g. 2000 lines, Visual Studio height of 1000px, the Visual Studio minimap will render lines by "sampling" (i.e. the height of a line in the minimap would become 0.5px), and at one point the Visual Studio minimap renders only every 2nd line, every 3rd line, etc.

We discussed this in the team and found it to be inferior in this regard. It is of course a very nice solution in the cases where a line height in the minimap is >1px.

[rickvanprim]

You can still make out the shape of the document from the sampling, so I dispute that that makes it not useful. Attached is an example from a 4000 line .cpp file, which still seems pretty readable to me. By contrast I find the scrolling version pretty useless once the document is long enough to scroll due to not being able to know my exact position relative to the entire document. I think I primarily navigate in terms of "roughly 80% through the document" more than code shape, and use code shape once I'm in that area.

[kkeri]

I'm also advocate of full document mode.

Consider that the editor window now displays 3 different mappings of a document:

• one screen of the document in the main area
• the full document on the scroll bar
• a variable part of the document in the minimap.

I loved this feature in VS but the partail view is somewhat confusing for my eyes.