Sexy scrolling feature - SyntaxEditor Brainstorming Forum

Posted 16 years ago by Matt Whitfield

What would be really nice, when scrolling through a large document, is a visual overview feature. I haven't really seen it in any other editor, just thought it might be nice.

Basically it would be an overlay which appears when scrolling, which would show 5 or so screens worth of information - so when scrolling through the document, you could 'look ahead' to where you wanted to scroll to.

I am not sure of the implications for parsing - persumably the part of the document that you wanted to render in the small window would have to be lexed & highlighted before it could be shown in the overlay window...

Anyway, a picture paints 1000 words:

http://www.atlantis-interactive.co.uk/scrollexample.jpg

Comments (8)

Posted 16 years ago by Actipro Software Support - Cleveland, OH, USA

That is really neat, definitely something to keep in mind. I haven't seen it before. Thanks for the screenshot.

Actipro Software Support

Posted 16 years ago by Boyd - Sr. Software Developer, Patterson Consulting, LLC

Indeed... that's a pretty cool scrolling feature. Very slick.

Posted 16 years ago by Wesner Moise

This feature is from a free addin available for Visual Studio.

RockScroll

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingRockScroll.aspx

Posted 16 years ago by Matt Whitfield

Ok - I hadn't heard of rock scroll... so... I installed rock scroll and had a go - and I would say that it's quite similar to what I had thought of - but not exact... Basically what I had thought of would only pop up when you were actively using the scroll bar - RockScroll seems to permanently eat real-estate wheras the idea with the mockup above is that it would 'pop-up'.

The other difference is that in the mockup picture I made, I just used 5 screens worth of information (i.e. two up, currently focused, two down) - wheras rockscroll shows the entire source file. I'd be interested to see what people thought about the validity of each?

Posted 16 years ago by Actipro Software Support - Cleveland, OH, USA

Personally I think the popup is a more effective use of space. Although it might be nice to have a way to have it show without having to be moving the scrollbar.

Actipro Software Support

Posted 16 years ago by Boyd - Sr. Software Developer, Patterson Consulting, LLC

I agree that the popup would be better for scrolling, but also see a benefit to having that full document snapshot. I know of Diff programs, for instance, that will show a graphic representing the entire document (highlighting intact) so that you can quickly see where differences are (based on the highlighting) and scroll to those areas. Having a simple control that would render an entire document like this could be very useful.

Posted 16 years ago by Matt Whitfield

I wonder... a 'whole document' view would almost certainly mean that rendering it in tokenised form wouldn't be viable - certainly for large documents. Maybe you could have a range parameter, set it accordingly and take the hit on performance if you want to?

Posted 16 years ago by Boyd - Sr. Software Developer, Patterson Consulting, LLC

Good point. There is a certain performance impact here. In the case of the Diff tool example, it would probably be rendered only one time since the view is more read-only in nature. For live documents, the developer would definately need to be able to control the frequency and range of the rendering.