Thoughts on Navigation

Bike Outliner
1

From a previous post, where it was asked to pull into a separate thread:

One other thought I had for a request was jump history so you can navigate around the jump stack. Perhaps there’s a buffer that remembers your row locations so you can navigate back and forth via a menu command.

Let me try explaining again. Right now we have Focus In and Focus Out. A lot of apps will generally have some type of History menu for Navigating Back and Forward:

CleanShot 2022-05-20 at 15.11.39@2x
CleanShot 2022-05-20 at 15.11.39@2x896×324 66.6 KB

Certain actions would make sense to keep track of so you can go back to jump back to your previous focused row. Let me give you an example.

  • Let’s say I’m focused in on today’s journal
  • I then run a scripting command that brings me to my inbox
  • Cool, I’ve added something quickly in my inbox and want to jump back to my today’s journal
  • I hit Focus Out but it brings me back home and I have to navigate back manually
2

Ideally, whenever there is a change of focused row, we could keep track of that state in an in memory stack so we can navigate it. Hopefully this clears things up a bit, I think it’d be huge for ux and navigating around larger documents.

3

Thanks that makes sense to me.

When you said “jump history” I associated that with a text editor feature where you designate “marks” and then jump back to them. I’m sure a useful system, but one that I’ve never really understood or used. Web browser style navigation history for focused item makes more sense to me.

2 Likes
4

That’s very succinct and exactly what I was referring to.

5

@robm I’m (year later!) working on this now in the current preview release:

6

I’ve just started playing with the new navigation feature, and I love it. Thank you.

The only thing i’d ask for is a few more letters per parent in the navigation bar. i do get that clicking on a parent gives me the whole downstream tree, but i’d rather just click on the right level in the first place.

Screenshot 2023-04-28 at 12.25.19
Screenshot 2023-04-28 at 12.25.19814×80 3.51 KB

7

I too am loving the breadcrumbs and navigation features! I was curious if it was planned to have mouse side buttons trigger the forward and back behavior like a web browser? That, or maybe a way to bind a keyboard shortcut to those actions?

8

I didn’t actually know about those buttons. I will be adding menu items, do you know if those buttons can be configured to call a menu item, or maybe I need to handle them specially in my code.

9

I am unfamiliar with how it is implemented in code, but I have always used Sensible Side Buttons to get this functionality working in native apps like Finder. There are also other apps that support it out of the box like Google Chrome and Slack.

macOS does recognize the side buttons as “Mouse Button 4”, “Mouse Button 5”, etc. although I believe it might be dependent on the mouse itself. You can see this by trying to assign a Keyboard / Mouse shortcut to something like Mission Control so maybe it is possible to assign them as a shortcut in Bike as well.

10

Thanks, it looks like I need to implement 3 finger swipe (left/right) for history navigation, and then Sensible Side Buttons can plug into that system for mouse side buttons.