Breadcrumb / path display / list view for "How'd I get here"

+1
That would be really helpful. Especially when using the references page.

Sometimes I didn’t have created a Link to the broader topic or another file where I came from and this would make it easy to jump back to the main topic, after exploring some other notes/ideas.

I saw that in RoamResearch the referenced links can be expanded directly in the file and that seems to be a great feature to quickly explore other notes.

I think an easy and usable way to quickly get back to the topics where you came from, would yield a similar benefit.

2 Likes

Sometimes, it is nice to have a view of where I am with regards to the navigation history kind of like in Dynalist or VS Code.

This way it is easy to navigate back to where I want to go.

This is different from Linked Mentions in that it is a long list of history.

2 Likes

Sup guys,

Decided to mockup a breadcrumbs idea. I created 2 concepts, one more drastic than the other, but I still like the idea.

I thought this would fit in the plugins section because it’d be something that depends on the user’s personal preference.

I’ll let the images speak for themselves.

Concept 1:

Nav bar replaces doc title with breadcrumbs, and the title is moved down to the actual contents (as seen below). This is something I personally like and can be seen in other software like Roam and Notion.

Concept 2:

Everything remains the same, except there’s a subtle breadcrumb reference on the top left of each document.

14 Likes

Looking at your option one, I’d reverse the direction of the breadcrumbs like so

Document Name < Parent Category < Top Category

This way, when the window is narrower and you have opened many documents from the same category, you can actually distinguish between them.

5 Likes

It seems to me your breadcrumbs aren’t breadcrumbs: it is the path to the location of your Hypertext Markup Language file.

Breadcrumbs are the chronology of files visited/opened.

Or do I misunderstand you?

I understand Breadcrumbs as a location to your currently open file. If we take a look at Notion’s breadcrumbs feature, it does exactly that:
image
In the example above, the breadcrumbs show the user the current file’s location and traces back to the last parent file.

That’ exactly what I said: it is the path to the location of your Hypertext Markup Language file.

Whereas breadcrumbs is a trail of web sites or files visited. So, the question is: do you just want the current file’s location to be shown (as e.g. in the Windows/Linux file explorer or in Mac’s Finder) or do you to want your last 5 (or whatever number) file names to be shown?

Sorry for not capturing the idea in your first comment.
The idea would be to present the file structure in a windows/linux context relative to the current file that you’re on.
I was not referring to breadcrumbs to the last X files you visited regardless of the folder structure of your vault, although I can see some use to it.
The plugin could let you choose whether to show breadcrumbs one way or another, depending on personal preference.

Yeah, I like the syntax you’re proposing.
I really don’t mind what the structure is like as long as I can navigate through my files in an easier, more convenient fashion. If the devs decide to implement it one way or another, I don’t mind adapting to the style.

1 Like

I second this !
Also maybe a third option as a stand alone plugin with a linear flow chart like in after effect :

3 Likes

+1 for clickable breadcrumbs / file path as in concept 2 (VS Code like)
it should be unobstrusive but easy to navigate

Document Name < Parent Category < Top Category

One reason I would not want the direction to go like that: If you select it to copy the path, it would be preferable to have a file path in the correct order so that you can copy/paste. (For example, to do command-line operations on the file path.)

What if we could have navigation just like in a browser or an undo/redo history in a form of breadcrumb.

Rather than having breadcrumb for the location of the file, with history we could navigate back and forth on recently opened files.

Perhaps this could go as a plugin.

5 Likes

I love the idea of a History plugin! Being able to track which files you opened would be super powerful. Right now the file list allows for sorting by name or edit date, but I could imagine something that works a bit more like the history in a web browser… i.e. showing which files you opened each day. The same file would therefore show up multiple times in this context, if you opened it on multiple different days.

1 Like

For the first feature request, there’s an existing one :wink:

For the second part — revisions! Nice idea. I know this can be natively done in macOS (like iA Writer does), so this seems like a not too-far-stretched plugin idea, too.

Have a sidebar pane that displays breadcrumbs between two notes.

So you select note Y and note Z. Then it displays all the different paths between the two notes.

Note Y…Note B…Note C…Note Z

Note Y…Note R…Note D…Note Z

etc…

3 Likes

Isn’t this just the graph view but a filtered version of it as described in this feature request?

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/to-filter-the-graph-view/88/4

Not quite. Filtering out everything would make the scope too narrow and you’d lose inbetween connections. Also it isn’t a graph view. It would be its own pane or plugin that shows the breadcrumbs more concisely and compactly.

This would be great if there was a visualization for the path you take from one note to another.

This is also one way we could visualize a timeline graph.

@rigmarole I do not see any incompatibility here.
In order to display title-beginning always in the same position (top left corner), and for reasons described by @rsdimitrov ,
trail will be displayed as suggested by in post #24.
Example: “current ← previous ← preprevious
It will can be clickable in this mode.

But when e.g. entering it for editing, raw text will be in standard address-bar format.
Example: preprevious/previous/current
The “Copy” command returns this too