If I view a notebook when not logged into Observable I see a column of dots on the right-hand side of the screen that lets me easily view which cells are referenced by the current cell. Clicking on one of the dots allows me to easily navigate to the referenced cell. It would be really convenient if a similar tool was available to me whilst I was creating a notebook. However, this tool only seems to be available to me if I switch to “classic” view.
Is there a similar tool or workflow, that allows for easy visualisation of cell references and navigation between them, available without switching to “classic” view?
It’s seems that you’ve noticed the critical issue:
Note that the “Next” view is still in development; it’s not fully featured yet but it seems that the team has deemed it fully featured enough and to have enough new goodies to merit default status. Some features of Classic are still being added, though. The embed code buttons only made it in last week, for example. I seem to recall seeing that the tree view is expected to be in Next. So I’d just keep switching to classic, when you need until then.
That’s right, as @mcmcclur helpfully pointed out the Next environment is still under development and we are in the process of adding Classic features like the “minimap” aka Visual Dataflow (which I totally agree is a super helpful tool!). At this point we are currently planning to release that feature in Next a couple of months from now, hopefully around August, although that timeline is subject to change. When it’s released we’ll let everyone know in our release notes & on the forum/social media, so stay tuned!
In the meantime, as you’ve discovered you can get the minimap back by switching into the Classic environment using the notebook actions ("…") menu for a given notebook. And if you’d like to make Classic your default environment for all notebooks until visual dataflow is available in Next, you can do that by changing the “Enable experimental features” setting in your user settings page.