Listen to hash changes for highlighted lines

[pzich]

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Frequently when sending people links to code, I want to highlight a specific block I am talking about. This can be done by adding a hash param to the URL (e.g. .../path/to/file#L123-L456).

As far as I can tell, there is no way to select these lines by clicking and dragging down the line numbers or otherwise‡ so typically what I do is click the starting line number (in my example, 123) and then manually append -L456 to the end. If I do that in the browser's URL bar and press enter, nothing changes. This is because changes to just the URL hash don't trigger a new page load, but rather emit a hashchange event with the old and new URL.

If I listen to these events with something like window.addEventListener('hashchange', console.log), I can see the event fires with an oldURL and newURL property containing the old and new URLs. It would be great if the page itself could subscribe to these and update the highlighted code, or at the very least trigger it's own refresh to render the "freshly loaded" version of the page.

‡ Note: I did discover that if you select text on the right, then click one of the line numbers in between, it instead generates a URL of the form #L12C3-#L45C6, however I generally prefer to send whole line range selections than parts of the lines.

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