HACKER Q&A
📣 meken

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


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

  👤 retrocryptid Accepted Answer ✓
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.

👤 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.)

👤 compressedgas
A workaround would be to duplicate the tab before you search.
👤 pkrumins
Shift+F3