Remember Extension For Quarto

remember is an extension for Quarto to save and restore navigation position across page visits for HTML documents, Quarto books, and Reveal.js presentations.

Installation

quarto add mcanouil/quarto-remember

This will install the extension under the _extensions subdirectory.

If you're using version control, you will want to check in this directory.

Usage

To activate the filter, add the following to your YAML front matter:

filters:
  - remember

How It Works

HTML Documents

The extension automatically tracks:

• Scroll Position: Saves your vertical scroll position as you navigate the page.
• Hash Anchors: Remembers which section you were viewing (e.g., #section-name).
• Visit Timestamp: Records when you last visited the page.

When you return to the page, you'll be prompted with a modal asking if you want to resume from where you left off.

Quarto Books

For Quarto books, the extension provides cross-chapter navigation tracking:

• Current Chapter: Remembers which chapter you were reading.
• Scroll Position: Saves your position within that chapter.
• Automatic Redirect: When you return to any page in the book, you'll be automatically redirected to the chapter you were reading.
• Visit Timestamp: Records when you last visited the book.

The extension detects Quarto books by checking for both .page-navigation and .nav-sidebar elements.

Reveal.js Presentations

The extension automatically tracks:

• Slide Indices: Saves the current horizontal, vertical, and fragment indices.
• Visit Timestamp: Records when you last viewed the presentation.

When you return to the presentation, you'll be prompted to resume from your last viewed slide.

Features

• Non-Intrusive: Only prompts when there's a meaningful position to restore (scroll > 100px or at a specific slide).
• User Control: Users can choose to resume or start fresh. Declining clears the stored position.
• Page-Specific: Each page/book tracked separately.
• Cross-Chapter Navigation: For books, automatically redirects to the correct chapter.
• Prompt Debouncing: Won't show the prompt more than once every 5 seconds to avoid annoyance.
• Time-Aware: Shows "X minutes/hours/days ago" to help users decide whether to resume.
• Privacy-Focused: All data stored locally in browser localStorage, nothing sent to external servers.
• Accessible: Keyboard navigation support (Escape to dismiss prompt), ARIA attributes for screen readers.
• Responsive: Mobile-friendly modal design.
• Dark Mode: Adapts to user's colour scheme preference (supports both system preference and Quarto's .quarto-dark/.quarto-light classes).

Limitations

• Only works with HTML-based output formats (html, revealjs, and book).
• Requires browser support for localStorage (not available in some private browsing modes).
• For regular pages, position is tracked per pathname. For books, position is tracked per book (all chapters share the same tracking).
• Book detection requires both .page-navigation and .nav-sidebar elements in the DOM.

Example

Here is the source code for a minimal example: example.qmd.

Output of example.qmd:

• HTML
• Reveal.js