Use case or problem
Let’s say I have a long note which contains a footnote reference [1] near the top. As I’m reading the note, I click on the footnote reference to take me to the bottom of the page where I can see/edit the footnote. After I’m done, I’d like to quickly go back to the footnote reference by clicking the mouse “back” button to continue reading.
Current workaround (optional)
There already exists an arrow button beside the footnote to go back to the reference location, but the button is small and I’d prefer to minimize how much I need to hunt for buttons on screen with the cursor since can often lead to misclicks and is slower.
Proposed solutions
A solution could be to add the footnote reference’s line number to the navigation history used by the UI and mouse forward/back buttons. This would allow us to quickly scroll back up to where we originally clicked on that footnote reference.
A more general solution could be to track any selected line changes in the note within the navigation history, not just when clicking footnote references.
- One approach would be to add any line to the history when the user clicks on it. However this may make it cumbersome for users to quickly switch between tabs/files since they’d first have to go through a bunch of lines within the same note first.
- Another approach to minimize the history could be to only track lines when a “significant” action has been taken on that line (e.g. the user edits the line, the user clicks on a link, etc.).
- An example of this feature can be seen in Visual Studio 2022.