Display link hints without needing to press Alt+J

[flux77]

Is there a way to automatically show link hints right after a webpage has finished loading, without needing to manually press Altj? If not, could this feature be implemented?

[lydell]

Hi!

Hints that are visible at all times for all clickable things – I can’t even imagine how that would work.

• My first thought is to give hints to all elements on the page, not just the ones visible on screen. Problems:
  • All hints become longer.
  • Slower.
  • What to do when more clickable elements appear? There might not be enough hints left (remember, they are prefix codes). One could anticipate that by making all hints even longer from the start to have more “space” left, to some degree. Or one needs to recalculate all hints when new elements appear. But then they might change just before you were going to type one of them, and suddenly you’ve clicked something other than you intended.
• Another idea is to recalculate all hints as you scroll. But it will feel pretty janky. If you’ve ever tried scrolling while having the hints up in Link Hints – that’s kind of what it will look like.
• Another downside is that I poll all hinted elements for their position every second or so, to move the hint if the element moves. That would be battery draining if you ran it all the time.

The more I think about it, some kind of persistent hints feels like a completely different feature with different problems needing to be solved. It’s not something I’m interested in.