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Ask HN: Is there a “jump back” feature in browsers after doing Ctrl-F?

1 points by meken ↗ HN
When I’m browsing a long page, if I do a Ctrl-F, it will jump me to some random part in the page, and I don’t know how to get back to where I was

I would like a back button within a page, to go back to my previous location before the “jump”

As I think about it, vim has a notion of this, it’s called the jump list, and you can traverse it [1]

Does such a thing exist? I have the same issue in Mac Preview PDF viewer as well

I’m mostly using Chrome btw

[1] https://medium.com/@kadek/understanding-vims-jump-list-7e1bfc72cdf0

9 comments

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retrocryptid
Oh wait, you don't mean Shift-Ctrl-G, you mean "return the state of my browser window to the state before I initially hit Ctrl-F."

Emacs also does this. If you hit ctrl-s (even repeating the search a couple times), a ctrl-g will take you back to where you were before you did the search.

Let us know if you add this as a suggested improvement for firefox or chrome, I'd be happy to upvote it.

meken
> return the state of my browser window to the state before I initially hit Ctrl-F

That sounds exactly like what I want! However, on Mac chrome, Shift-Cmd-G is mapped to "Find previous"

compressedgas
A workaround would be to duplicate the tab before you search.
meken
Yes, I find myself doing this sometimes
MilnerRoute
Good question. (Maybe someone needs to make an extension for this?)

Sometimes when I have to search for a phrase, but I want to then return to where I left off, I'll try to find something unique about the part of the document that I'm currently reading first. (Something that's unique enough that I can find it with a second search.)

meken
That’s a clever workaround
pkrumins
Shift+F3
meken
Playing around with this, I can’t get it to do anything, nor can I find any documentation on this shortcut.

What is it doing for you?

pkrumins
F3 jumps to the next search match and Shift+F3 jumps back.