I think a minimap is a navigation tool, not a browsing too.
The eye is good at finding patterns (often even where there are none
) and although I may not know the line number I'm looking for, or where the section has moved to while other people have inserted/deleted/moved lines in the file, but often certain chunks of code have a distinctive "shape".
That said, I don't think it's a strong navigation tool. It simply doesn't scale well, even with some image processing tricks to boost color preservation when the image is scaled down very tiny. For example, in a 500 line file it will work ok, but in a 2000 line file it simply won't work well: the tallest monitor I have is only 1200 lines tall, so we're talking less than 1 pixel per line. I like the
idea of a minimap, but I just don't see how to fix the design problems (I fear they are inherent).
It would probably be a better use of time to investigate ways to make use of Selective Display to help with navigation. E.g. maybe Selective Display could show statistics about how much stuff (not necessarily just a simplistic line count) is hidden in a collapsed node, or show a heat map of sizes of code blocks in a file, or so forth.