scrollable sticky toc (enhancement request )

[kulbhushanchand]

In reference to closed issue on this repo - Link

The asked person had made a custom fix.

However If I may request for this feature in the theme, because having lengthy table of contents overflowed from the page and are not reachable.

@mmistakes - Would you like to introduce it?

[mmistakes]

Don't know if this could be done gracefully. The right sidebar is a huge hack right now because it supports Markdown auto TOCs and a Liquid helper that creates the TOC.

The placement of the HTML is more flexible with the Liquid helper method, but styling it in a way to not break Kramdown TOCs is challenging.

I prefer the pattern of not sticking the TOC and having it scroll with the content. For documentation heavy sites the left nav sidebar is a better place for adding waypoints.

I'm willing to bet most people ignore the sidebar anyways. There's likely few people who are going to be bouncing around multiple headings on a single page. Sticky sidebars and "back to top" links are things people like to add to their site just because they can.

But I don't think they add value to most users, other than clutter up the page more.

[kulbhushanchand]

You had me convinced about the added visual clutter because of table of contents. Personally I too give less attention to them. However this may be a dormant feature in the theme. Also the bug in the current toc implementation (see the last paragraph of this comment).

My main motive was to get your attention to this closed issue - link1
where the person had implimented the same on this page - link2 . It seems like he has implimented it very easily.

You can see in link 2, he have implemented the scrollable toc. Check this commit
and the following consecutive commits you can decipher the css changes made by him.

Again I would say that the present system of toc in the theme have problem displaying large number of headings in the post.
### To see the problem - You can try to add a lot of headings in the post and in yaml add toc_sticky: true. In this case the table of content will overflow from the page and the last enteries on the list of toc will not be accessible.

[mmistakes]

Link2 is super buggy for me. There's all sorts of screen flashes and inconsistencies with how the page scrolls, don't think that's a particularly good solution.

As far as right sidebars that get cutoff. This is one of the reasons I was hesitant to add a sticky behavior. If your body content is shorter than the height of the table of contents, it's going to extend beyond the viewport.

Either turn off the stickiness or limit what headlines are used to make it shorter.

[kulbhushanchand]

Thanks for the pointer to limit headlines.

[stale]

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