Apply colouring on minimap makes navigating code much easier

[elias-Mimetrik]

Thanks for the useful extension! Have you thought about finding a way to apply the colouring to the minimap? The minimap is essential in helping in navigation, especially to know the location at the code. Why not use colours to segment functions (only functions) like so: It makes the code much easier to read and digest.

My argument is: Just by glancing at the minimap, I know my location exactly within the code, and this gives me the following knowledge/abilities. For example:

1. I can see the file has 5 functions, and that I am at the beginning of the 4th function.
2. I can easily jump to the beginning of the current function, say to modify a parameter.
3. A glance at the map, I can see the size of each function (from the segmentations), and I can tell exactly where I am and which part of code I am looking at.
4. I can tell the file has two almost similar size functions (could be overrides), it has 3 other main bigger functions. So I can see the sizes of the functions and their count. Glancing at the map and the file name (the tab) helps me remember what this file does...etc. etc.

RE: microsoft/vscode#231384 (comment)

[leodevbro]

Thanks so much for sharing this idea. Unfortunately VS Code extension API does not seem to have any method to render visual elements inside the minimap or clone visual elements from document view into the minimap.

I search in Google and VS Code Extension API official docs, found nothing.

And AI told me this:

To be clear: there is no minimap property in createTextEditorDecorationType. The only way to render visual elements near the minimap area is through overviewRulerColor and overviewRulerLane, which render in the overview ruler (the scrollbar area), not directly inside the minimap itself.

So, for now, it seems possible to only show some color blocks in the scrollbar (ruler) which is on the right side of minimap.

And maybe we can think that it is still useful, but here is the thing:
Even if we can render any visual elements inside both the minimap and the ruler, and even if we can clone visual elements from document view into the minimap and the ruler, we still have another huge issue to fix: performance. Right now, blockman does not render all blocks in the entire document at the same time, instead Blockman renders blocks only inside the visible viewport area (with plus several lines up and down), because rendering blocks on more that 100-200 lines requires too much CPU power/speed, and the entire UI becomes too slow. So, first we should be able to render blocks in the entire file document view, and then we can think about doing the same in the minimap.