Issue
Something I find frustrating with the quick panel (eg, Goto Symbol, Cmd/Ctrl + R), is how it isn’t a great substitute for a searchable Table of Contents or Outline. With a table of contents or outline, you can view an item in its context with the previous and subsequent items easily seen in their sequence. When searching for a particular item, I often find myself wanting that additional contextual information.
With the quick panel, the list of items contracts to only those that match the query. While this is very nice in its own way, I often wish I could expand the list of items to centre on the first or any given match but with all the other items listed in order, much like the state of Goto Symbol when initially called, just so I can view the context. This desire for context is driven, in my case at least, because my mind encodes the identity of an item to a large extent by its context (eg, “the function with strip in the name in the class with clean in the name that is after the MetaData class”).
I’ve mentioned before that I’d love a built-in outline view in the sidebar much like Sublime Merge’s multiple side-bars, but this would be a smaller alteration to get closer to some nice outline-like interaction.
Solution?
- Add functionality available through key bindings bound to the context of interacting with the quick panel
- Functionalities:
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Toggle Quick Panel ViewbetweenMatchedandExpanded - In
Expandedmode:- list all possible items, but centre on the first match candidate
-
Skip to Matchwith another command/key-binding to skip up/down to next/previous match candidates while preserving the full list of all items
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