[politician]

Many multiplayer video games have a radar that provides a high-level summary of the positions of teammates and hostiles. This is useful information that helps navigation, and it's usually a small element tucked in a corner.

A 2D view of code layout could be useful in this sort of secondary radar way for learning a new codebase, refactoring, etc.

As a primary mechanism for writing code, outside specialized applications like graphics shader development, I'm not sure it makes sense.

[alanbernstein]

Sublime has the minimap, a name which sounds like it was borrowed from the videogame world.

[warlog]

Isn't this just a map? Usually maps are smaller than the territory.

[nefitty]

I haven’t really found a use for the minimap in VSC. I’m not sure if there’s some strategy or concept that it’s supposed to assist with, besides navigating large files more quickly.

[chrispsn]

A mini-map is a cool idea! In Excel I often temporarily zoom out to get a big picture view of the program structure.