General feedback on the v10 overhaul

[stamminator]

Kudos to you for the excellent v10 update. Everything across the board has improved drastically. The biggest things I've noticed are:

• Performance is much better.
• The behavior of file order versus alphabetical filtering is very intuitive, even when dealing with regions.
• The filtering rules are much simpler to use. I found it easy to configure some custom settings without having to jump out to the repo's wiki.
• Several bug fixes, including the crucial one that used to break the Document Outline window.

Here is some general feedback, as well as a question about the extension listing at the end. For the entirety of this feedback, assume the following simple test class HomeController with base class ControllerBase is in use:

Dark theme

CodeNav looks very polished when using the VS light theme, but it has several issues in dark mode.

(1) Can't tell which sorting mode is currently active.

(2) Hovering over the gaps in between child node shows the documentation tooltip for the parent node. Ideally, this should only show when hovering directly over the parent node (in this case, the HomeController node).

(3a) Hover contrast is poor because of the bright blue background color. Possible solution: rather than setting a solid background color on select/hover and having a bunch of theme-handling code, maybe the background color could be set to a partially transparent color that will have good contrast in both dark and light mode.
(3b) Both the node rectangle and the node text each appear to have distinct hover styling, creating a sort of "half hovered" state.

Filtering

(4) Switching between bookmark filtering and configured filtering is a bit confusing. Disabling bookmark filtering always opens the filtering settings, which feels clunky. Possible solution: configured filtering rules should always be active, and bookmark filtering should be an on/off toggle that's layered on top of configured filtering. In theory, the downside of this is that the user might have bookmarked something which then gets hidden after changing configured filter settings, but I think this is an acceptable edge case and that configured filter settings aren't going to be modified very often after the user sets them up.

(5) The Empty modifier could use an all/indeterminate state. To apply a style to all base class (and their children) nodes, I currently have two create two "Base Class" rules with one having Empty checked and the other having it unchecked. Some users might find this unintuitive. It would be nice to have this consolidated to one rule.

(6) Base class nodes should probably have some sort of icon. Some options from the VS 2026 image library:

• (Inheritance.png + Class.png)
• Whatever this icon is. I couldn't find it in the image library.

Window synchronization

(7) CodeNav window doesn't stay up-to-date with the selected editor window. It only updates once the user does some sort of input into the editor window.

Some nice-to-haves

(8) It would be great to have a few more Actions available in the filter rules. For example, font scale percentage and an italics checkbox. In this case, it might be better to call them Effects rather than Actions. The Supercharger extension's similarly designed "CodeNAV" feature has a few such options that might be worth taking a look at. I personally stopped using Supercharger due to longstanding bugs, bloat, and lack of developer support even when using a paid license, so I'm ecstatic to see this project take a similar "Document Outline, but better" concept and improve upon it.

This Extension Listing

Out of curiosity, why create a new extension listing separate from CodeNav 2022? Most people rely on extension updates and don't go looking for new listings, so they'll probably miss out on v10. In my opinion, it would be better to have one single extension named CodeNav while leaving non-compatible legacy versions like CodeNav 2019 named with the year.

Thank you for making this great tool!

[sboulema]

Thank you very much for the praise and the extremely detailed and very good report!

I will look into all the suggestions and see how much of it I can improve 😄

---

Using this as a TODO list for the suggestions in this discussion.
Items listed below have been fixed and will be available in an upcoming release 🚀

Dark theme
(1) Can't tell which sorting mode is currently active.
Changed the color of the button border

(2) Hovering over the gaps in between child node shows the documentation tooltip for the parent node.
Tooltip of parent node now only active on header

(3a) Hover contrast is poor because of the bright blue background color.
Change blue hover color to gray

(3b) Both the node rectangle and the node text each appear to have distinct hover styling, creating a sort of "half hovered" state.
Due to new hover color, font can stay the same color, removing the half hover state

Filtering
(4) Switching between bookmark filtering and configured filtering is a bit confusing.
Button has been changed to a toggle button, allowing you to easily filter (and not filter) on bookmarks

(5) The Empty modifier could use an all/indeterminate state.
Indeterminate state added

(6) Base class nodes should probably have some sort of icon.
Base classes, implemented interfaces, and regions now have icons

Window synchronization
(7) CodeNav window doesn't stay up-to-date with the selected editor window.
Split to a separate issue: #159

Some nice-to-haves
(8) It would be great to have a few more Actions available in the filter rules.
Italic and font scale have been added as filter actions

This Extension Listing
The extension marketplace is a very weird environment. I can't rename the "CodeNav 2022" entry so that is starting to look dated. So I wanted to start fresh with a "CodeNav" entry.

And I was not all too sure the v10 version would be accepted by all users since it is (still) missing synced collapsible ranges support to be feature complete with v9, so this was also my way of soft-launching.

Plan is to look into the ranges support and once that is done, I will probably upload the v10 version to both the "CodeNav" and "CodeNav 2022" entries.

[sboulema]

Grab the new release 🚀

https://github.com/sboulema/CodeNav/releases/tag/v10.2.105