Comment by Davertron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Davertron | Hacker News Reader

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I use these as well, but maybe something I didn't articulate well is that it's often useful to remember where I've been. One thing that I haven't played with in VS Code but that bites me a lot (and sorry, I don't know the proper name for this setting/feature) is that often when you're navigating you're doing so in the same vs code tab. If I remember to double-click the tab it'll hang around, but that's a pretty janky workflow, and I don't ALWAYS want to do that. Ctrl+- works if I hop into a method/function and want to look at it briefly and hop out, but I find if I go more than a couple levels deep it would be nice to mark certain areas as I go so I can easily get back to them.

Sometimes I do this by just adding a comment, and now that file will at least show up in version control as changed and I can get back to it if I need to, but that's also a little bit janky and I have to be careful I don't leave that cruft around on accident when I commit.

I'm trying out a bookmark extension in VS code and we'll see how it goes, I'm already a little bit annoyed by it in that it doesn't seem to let me organize the bookmarks in any way, so it might be somewhat useful for temporary spelunking, but I won't for example be able to save these bookmarks to refer to them later, which seems like it could be useful.

Sourcegraph has this concept of "Notebooks" which allows you to add files and intermix markdown, which feels like a pretty cool idea, and if I'm just reading code in Sourcegraph it's great, but when I'm in my code editor and making changes I don't want to bounce over to another tool. Maybe it's as simple as keeping some sort of Markdown file open that I write into and then add links to file line numbers as I go, I haven't tried that but I suppose it wouldn't be the worst, and allows me to organize the links in any fashion I see fit.

Sourcegraph Notebooks PM here. We have a notepad feature you can enable that basically does what you're describing and allows you to create a notebook from the saved content in one click. There's a button to enable the notepad on the notebooks page (https://sourcegraph.com/notebooks or https://<your-sg-url.com>/notebooks).

It follows you around as you navigate search results and files and you can add searches, files, and file ranges to it, as well as notes for each item. Quick demo video: https://storage.googleapis.com/sourcegraph-assets/docs/image...

I just discovered this feature so I haven't played with it enough yet but it seems to tick all my boxes. One thing that I found confusing about the UX though was that I didn't realize at first I could continue searching around and adding content, so when I added my first bit of content and clicked "Create Notebook" and then subsequently navigated somewhere else and wanted to add content I ended up creating another notebook instead of adding it to a pre-existing one. Or sometimes I come back and want to add more content to an existing notebook, but I don't see how to do that.

That’s great feedback, thanks. We deliberately kept adding to existing notebooks out of scope for the first Notebooks release but had a feeling it would be requested pretty quickly.

It might also be more intuitive to clear out the notepad after a notebook is created but curious what you think.

Thanks again for the feedback, feel free to reply here if you have any other thoughts.

I find the Peek windows handy (the default experience for Find All References and the difference between Go to Definition and Peek Definition).

I find VS Code's Outline tool quite handy. By default it's hidden away at the bottom of the main Explorer tab, but you can turn on the Secondary Sidebar (now with a button at the top of the window) and drag it over on to the Secondary Sidebar to really give it room to grow and not fight your file explorer view for space. (Timeline I also like to move into the Secondary Sidebar as a good place for it.)

Outline resembles the Breadcrumbs at the top of an editor and even if you don't have great bookmarks, being able to quickly expand to a specific symbol in a file is handy.

Also Back/Forward mostly work pretty well in VS Code. If you've got the extra mouse buttons that can be used for Back/Forward in a browser those work well, as does the most common browser shortcut Alt+Left and Alt+Right. In very recent versions you can right click the Title Bar and turn on the Command Center and it gives you Back and Forward buttons there in the title bar, even more like a browser.

(ETA: holding Ctrl+Tab gives you a History menu in the order of Back/Forward sort order.)

> One thing that I haven't played with in VS Code but that bites me a lot (and sorry, I don't know the proper name for this setting/feature) is that often when you're navigating you're doing so in the same vs code tab. If I remember to double-click the tab it'll hang around, but that's a pretty janky workflow, and I don't ALWAYS want to do that.

This is called "Preview". If you don't double click to open the file, you can double-click the tab itself later if you decide to want to keep it open. (There's also Keep Open on the context menus and it has a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+K Enter.)

You can entirely disable Preview with the Settings key "workbench.editor.enablePreview". (Set it to false. Or uncheck it in the UI.) You could make it apply to only a specific workspace while you are trying to navigate it by adding that to a .vscode/settings.json file in the project (though this specific Setting, I probably would try to avoid checking in to your project repo to avoid annoying other users).

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