Navigation doesn't keep track of your position in the hierarchy

[lf-]

Observations

I click on concepts then flakes then "why should i enable flakes" from the home page. I open the sidebar on mobile. I expect to be able to navigate up in the hierarchy somehow.

Problem

Currently if you're in a specific section in the docs, you can't easily go up in the logical hierarchy to a more general section.

I had a related beef with not being able to choose Nix reference manual versions by deleting URL components which I probably filed somewhere else also.

Approaches

The way mdbook seems to do it, you can open the sidebar and the current page is highlighted. Similarly in okular while viewing pdfs. This requires a sidebar that shows every section though, and might be a bit far into paper metaphor (e.g. what order things appear in is a very book thing ported onto to a hypertext system).

Another thing we could do is breadcrumbs in the top of the page somewhere like docs.python.org (though most of the time I would consider that site a counterexample of usability). Evidently Sphinx supports it.

Willing to help?

Perhaps.

Priorities

Add 👍 to issues you find important.

[fricklerhandwerk]

The way mdbook seems to do it, you can open the sidebar and the current page is highlighted. [...] This requires a sidebar that shows every section though

This is what Sphinx does as well. There is a right side bar for the sections.

PS: Sphinx is not great, but mdBook is definitely worse. I tried customising both, and... no. I'd rather write my own framework than trying to do something that the authors didn't consider for these tools.