The first thing I do when I work in an editor with a mini-map is -- turn it off. I find it mostly the most useless feature for coding, and for sites it seems to be equally useless. Why?
1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or navigating.
2. Short or long pages, both don't really benefit from the loss of screen real-estate. Or the distraction really.
3. Other tools like a proper index with descriptive headers, or the search function work so much better to navigate the page.
Where mini-maps could be awesome are large images, or maps. They tend to visual in nature, and when zoomed in you can look at the mini-map to see where you are in the whole. Which is useful.
So, cool future, but this doesn't really seem like a great implementation.
I leave it on. It acts as a larger scrollbar when I use the mouse/trackpad/whatever pointing device to scroll. Operating systems these days are all about hiding the scrollbar and/or making it as small as possible. The minimap not only solves that issue, but also gives a bit of a visual representation of the file contents. Sure, you can't read the text, but if you've worked with a file long enough, you know exactly what you are looking at.
The irony is that the future of scrollbars, especially with narrow webpages and wide monitors, could have been minimaps. But instead we got disappearing scrollbars and reading indicators…
> Operating systems these days are all about hiding the scrollbar and/or making it as small as possible.
At least while coding this is actually pretty old school to have no scrollbar at all. My emacs has no gui elements. I dont need them. I see a 89% to know where I am right now but this information is actually not really useful.
I move expression/function/method/bookmark wise for and backward or I just search and leave marks where I to jump back later. I really avoid touching my mouse and my window manager (xmonad) and development environment are entirely keyboard driven. I tried minmaps, its just distracting eye candy maybe a bit usefull while reviewing a codebase or looking for something.
I just use the scroll wheel / touch pad, especially the one on Apple's mouse is really intutive. But I also try to not have my files get too large, or use the search function to quickly scroll to somewhere I know.
I think probably most of us use the scroll wheel (or equivalent) to scroll, but the advantage of the visible scroll bar is the immediate feedback of both document length and current location.
I use the minimap a lot, as a much better scrollbar. I tend to work on long files and even if I am rarely looking directly at the minimap, it is in my field of view and I often subconsciously glance at it.
This kind of feature is clearly no one-size0-fits-all, but it would be a mistake to consider it is useless because you don't like it.
Same, also in vscode disable the text rendering (which is actually useless), increase the block sizes (shape of the code) and you can recognize bits of your code easily.
>1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or navigating.
It's for looking at the shape of the code, not the contents. Also VSCode for example will show errors visibly highlighted in red in the minimap as well, which makes them easier to navigate to.
- (Linter) Warnings (in most themes a yellow or orange), like compile errors
- Marks for recently edited sections of code (in most themes a blue). Those marks are also shown in the left hand gutter beside lines but I think they are sometimes too subtle there, but their mini-map counterparts are less subtle.
- Current global search results (a bright gray or sometimes yellow, depending on theme)
- Current file search results (a slightly different gray)
- Current "active token" search results (another gray), such as when you put the cursor mid-word and VS Code naturally highlights all the other uses of that word
- Indicators for all of the lines containing your cursors when using multi-cursor (Alt+click to add additional cursors), which can be very useful to watch in large files with a bunch of shared refactors spread out over some distance
That's just off the top of my head because I use all of those to navigate some source documents.
I think one of the "shape of the code" things not everyone appreciates as well is that some languages create more interesting shapes than others. There are some languages where every file creates a very similar looking waterfall and there are others where the landmarks are much more obvious. Ironically it is sometimes the worst languages that have the most visually distinguishable shapes and where I find I appreciate the minimap most of all. You can visually see sections that began as copied and pasted duplicates, you can see the places where lines are highly repetitive and often those correspond to key patterns of very explicit landmarks ("there's the save code, you can tell because all the field string names are on the left side of assignments; there's the load code, you can tell because all the field string names are on the right side of assignments"). You can't make out the individual words, but you can certainly see those "blocks" like that from that "ten thousand foot view".
There's probably a visual processing/pattern matching thing about minimaps in general that some people have an easier time with than others. I've always liked a good map, regardless of context, so minimaps have always seemed useful to me. Map reading is a large combination of subtle skills, and I have just enough childhood training and natural aptitude that I have a great baseline for just about any map. I appreciate not everyone has those same skills, especially not in the weird arrangement that I do.
I think minimaps can also be great at improving on the 'preview' function of the classic scrollbar they iterate on. A scrollbar can tell me how long a page is and, therefore, give me an idea of whether I want to continue reading or not. But a minimap can help to differentiate between the "short article followed by pages of comments I can ignore" case and the "article far too long to even bother with" one.
I will say that I kind of love minimaps. I don't think that they should be required and I absolutely get why you'd want to turn them off, they take up a ton of space. If you're splitting files more often I could also see it getting really annoying.
But I think of code very visually and spatially and I don't split files until I have to, so it does help me quickly navigate to be able to sort of see the "shape" of a file and to be able to quickly jump around in it, especially if the file is divided into clear sections. Mostly just personal preference, and I agree they should never be mandatory.
And agreed on the large images/maps, most image editors have a viewport feature like that and it's pretty useful when doing detail work.
I don't use minimaps either, but I guess their utility much depends on what kind of documents you're editing. For programming languages where code is mostly structured inside functions, the "structure" view listing the types and functions in the file seems much more useful, as well as quick-search based on name and similar features.
But if the content is, say, HTML, or LaTeX, or a Word document, then I can see a visual representation being more useful. It would be interesting to know if there's some correlation between people liking/disliking minimaps and the type of content they tend to view/edit.
Marking recent / uncommitted additions and deletions to your code, and linter errors / warnings, so you can jump right down to them - is super useful, especially if you just changed one little thing amongst a pack of similar little things. You can jump back and forth between two trouble points in code with a single click, and without having to remember anything.
When I first encountered mini-maps (in Sublime Text, which I still use), I just thought it was just a gimmick that looked cool, but that's about it.
Now, I use it all the time, that's essentially a better scroll bar. In fact, the moment I saw the mini-map on the linked websites, I instantly tried to use it as a scrollbar, and was very disappointed to see that it didn't work.
A lot depends on your use-case and the kind of website you're using this on.
I would find this very useful on a site like Wikipedia where I often know the section I want to jump to before landing on the page.
(e.g. I want to see the number of goals Messi has scored each season at Barcelona and I know there's always a table at the bottom of most wiki articles regarding historical stats for soccer-players).
I could see from the mini-map where the tables are jump straight to it.
Like you said, the the text is too small to make out where you're going or navigating. But most often I find myself visiting sites that I've visited in the past and for those I have a good mental image of what the page already looks like. I can use the hints from a minimap to jump to the relevant section of the page.
For longer documents, especially with multiple different blocks like code or images, it seems to be actually useful. It gives a fast impression on the length of the site, where you are and where the interesting and boring landmarks might be. But this also demand that the content is centered, and hos enough free space on the side, which is not that uncommon these days.
1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or navigating.
2. Short or long pages, both don't really benefit from the loss of screen real-estate. Or the distraction really.
3. Other tools like a proper index with descriptive headers, or the search function work so much better to navigate the page.
Where mini-maps could be awesome are large images, or maps. They tend to visual in nature, and when zoomed in you can look at the mini-map to see where you are in the whole. Which is useful.
So, cool future, but this doesn't really seem like a great implementation.