Header links: drop-down menus?

[dbitouze]

It would be interesting if the header links could be drop-down menus allowing the user to access all the secondary entries for each of them, without having to click on them.

[eshalakhotia]

Hi, was this issue ever addressed? I also would like this ability

[trallard]

Are you suggesting that all the navbar links (e.g. user guide, contributing, ... in the screenshot) be turned into dropdown boxes containing all the sections and subsections within them?

If that is the proposal, I am not sure this would be a rather practical navigation user experience. Plus, considering that some sections can have many subsections (and sub-subsections) the navigation pattern and display of such dropdown would be somewhat problematic, particularly for mobile versions and for users that do not use mice or pointing devices on desktops.

[dbitouze]

@trallard Indeed, that is the proposal. It's something I appreciate on sites I'm visiting: accessing all the secondary entries, without having to click on them.

Maybe this could be provided but optional.

[drammock]

I can see why some users might find this desirable (though only if the dropdowns were 1 level deep; I agree with @trallard that including sub-sub-entries makes the UX too hard to manage for anyone lacking good vision or ability to use a mouse). That said, I'm afraid this is very low priority (for me at least), as there are many bugs and improvements ahead of it in the queue, and this proposal doesn't fix anything broken (it's a new option for something that already is functional). I'd review it if someone comes up with a PR, but I won't be implementing this myself.

[eshalakhotia]

@drammock There actually is a PR for this: #1165
If you would be able to review this and integrate it would be very helpful

[eshalakhotia]

@drammock Is there any update for the dropdown links capability?

[drammock]

Is there any update for the dropdown links capability?

sadly not. The PR you linked to (#1165) is stale (it would take some work to get it mergable) and as I said above

I'm afraid this is very low priority (for me at least), as there are many bugs and improvements ahead of it in the queue, and this proposal doesn't fix anything broken (it's a new option for something that already is functional).

I'm trying to arrange my schedule/funding sources so that I have more time for PST maintenance/improvement, but haven't succeded yet.

[CAM-Gerlach]

FWIW, this is something we'd really like to see with for Spyder docs with our migration to the upstream PST from our heavily customized and reworked old forked version, particularly given the major change to use top bar navigation (which the older PST version we'd forked did not) and expose the second-level index pages, with the consequences described in #90 . (Note we also considered migrating to Furo instead, which we concluded had some significant advantages over this theme in both that department and overall polish, but the lack of version and translation support was a hard blocker on that, as well as a bus factor of one on very busy maintainer.)

In particular, the specific functionality we'd be looking for is a theme option (presumably off by default) that works like the default MkDocs theme, making the first child toctree level visible in a dropdown just like the one under "More", which also conveniently allows us to bypass our (mostly empty) index pages for the categories. (To note, the above-linked PR addresses a related but separate feature from what we and most people appear to be asking here, allowing drop-down lists for external links).

Unfortunately, we don't have the funded bandwidth to work on this immediately, particularly since we'll be focusing on helping implement #507 as our first priority, along with potentially other issues on our end (and wouldn't want to divert limited review bandwidth from that, either). Longer term this could be something we could potentially look at assisting with, since it would significantly improve the usability of the theme on less extensive sites like ours, without requiring the theme to support multiple navigation/layout modes.