Native Notebooks - Outline selection does not go to top

[claudiaregio]

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open notebook
2. Select a cell in the notebook outline

Actual Behavior:

Cell selected ends up ~middle of the window/notebook + doesn't have any selection on the cell that was picked so it's hard to identify where it is.

Expected Behavior:

Cell to be at the top + selected mode indicator

[vscodebot]

(Experimental duplicate detection)
Thanks for submitting this issue. Please also check if it is already covered by an existing one, like:

• Native Notebooks - Navigating through Outline (#123175)
• Pressing enter in the outline on a notebook doesn't navigate to the selected cell (#122595)
• Select cell selecting its menu (#122320)
• Collapse/expand cell actions should work on all selected cells (#121695)
• Native Notebooks - Add cell behavior (#121032)

[claudiaregio]

Couldn't find the original issue and thought that I forgot to file it but turns out it was closed. #123175

Received customer feedback (4/4) in interviews that they expected selecting a cell in the table of contents would bring the cell to the top and currently they have a hard time identifying where the cell is.

(I have also struggled with this same issue, when I click on a cell in the outline I find my eyes scattering to figure out where the cell actually is)

This also deviates from Jupyter behavior which is why it could be hard to adapt to

[vscode-triage-bot]

Pinging notebook topic followers: @claudiaregio @rchiodo @greazer @DonJayamanne @jilljac

[rebornix]

@jrieken not sure if we want a different experience in notebook.

[greazer]

Some thoughts here:

• Markdown is typically used in a notebook to separate logical blocks of cells. It would seem to make sense to be able to see as much of that logical set of cells as possible when navigating to it. With a regular text editor seeing code context around the navigation point can make more sense.
• Jupyter's behavior is to scroll markdown to the top.
• It's unclear what would be appropriate if Show Code Cells for outline view is on and the user clicks on a piece of code in the outline view. Scrolling to the middle or top of the screen doesn't necessarily seem right. What about scrolling such that the cell that contains the piece of code is set at the top of the workbench window and the selected piece of code is highlighted temporarily? Of course we'd have to deal with large cells where the selected line appears below the bottom of the editor window. In that case, scrolling the code to the middle of the screen makes more sense (now you're more in the editor mode in this situation). Most notebooks do not contain large cells; however.

[greazer]

I'd also point out that the current behavior is quite buggy, which doesn't help. If you open this notebook and use breadcrumbs or the outline view to navigate the markdown, you'll easily run across them. I.e. sometimes the selected markdown is up off the top of the viewport (possibly because a cell is large below it), you'll also sometimes see headers getting rendered and then erased.

https://github.com/greazer/covid-19-data/blob/master/SampleNbsAndScripts/my-analysis-plotly.ipynb