Atom-ide-ui: Expose goToLocation activity as an Atom service

[bronson]

Description

Hyperclicking is easy and satisfying, but it's not so easy to return from a hyperclick.

Symbols View solved this with symbols-view:return-from-declaration. I really like that keystroke.

Maybe hyperclick could push its locations onto the sybmols view stack?

Or would there another way to make it easier to jump back from a hyperclick? I'm happy to bang together a package or a PR but I'm not quite sure how to solve this.

[hansonw]

https://atom.io/packages/last-cursor-position is another package that solves this.
In Nuclide we had a 'navigation stack' package that would allow you to easily jump back and forth.. maybe we can consider releasing that as a separate package.

[bronson]

Well, last-cursor-position operates on every cursor move. That's not really like symbols-view:return-from-declaration (unless I'm missing a way to configure last-cursor-position?)

Same question for the navigation stack package you refer to... Did it apply to every cursor move, or just to hyperclicks / symbol navigation?

[hansonw]

Nuclide's navigation stack hooked into the goToLocation function to only apply to those moves, which was quite a bit better. We should be able to provide that as an Atom service.. let me do that, actually, so that you can hook into that.

https://github.com/facebook-atom/atom-ide-ui/blob/master/modules/nuclide-commons-atom/go-to-location.js

[mehcode]

This sounds like a thing that is much better solved in a separate package.

Here's my concept:

• Every _file activation_ should be added to the stack.
• A _cursor move_ should update the current files "cursor" in the stack
• A _:go-back command should move up the stack
• A _:go-forward command should move down the stack
• A new file activation would cause the stack to remove all items past the current stack index

That'd be a neat and medium difficulty package to make.

I do think that atom-ide-ui should provide this functionality (as its very common in IDEs). I just want it to be "all the way" and not just "return from declaration". It'd probably make more sense to have a separate package that is either inline like the rest of the packages or installed with atom-package-deps.

[matthewwithanm]

We should be able to provide that as an Atom service.. let me do that, actually, so that you can hook into that.

Do we actually need a service you need to know about and use or can we just observe events?

[hansonw]

Where can we fire the events from? I guess it’d have to be somewhere that
other packages can access freely.

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 7:29 PM Matthew Dapena-Tretter <
[email protected]> wrote:

We should be able to provide that as an Atom service.. let me do that,
actually, so that you can hook into that.

Do we actually need a service you need to know about and use or can we
just observe events?

—
You are receiving this because you modified the open/close state.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
https://github.com/facebook-atom/atom-ide-ui/issues/50#issuecomment-330727335,
or mute the thread
https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAjPYpeySWigUIL5NlSugX8SxyO2_sviks5skHhugaJpZM4Pc-wO
.

[matthewwithanm]

Oh I meant can we observe existing events. So instead of calling gotoLocation(), you'd just open an editor as normal and we'd notice it and add it to the stack.

[hansonw]

(Sorry for the inactivity here) I've thought a bit more about the 'navigation stack' feature recently and it does seem like there doesn't really have to be any special-casing for goToLocation -- tracking all cursor changes and active editor switches really does seem like the best general solution. It's helpful to also look at how VSCode implements its history functionality as a starting point: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/ab1669f8987c585c260e824584e3bf79c82fc064/src/vs/workbench/services/history/electron-browser/history.ts#L104

[zmb3]

After reading through this thread I don't quite understand the outcome? Is there a centralized navigation stack somewhere? If so, how is it used?