Freeze top, left, and side banners of Canvas.

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the  Canvas Release Notes (2021-10-16) - Instructure Community

 


I have suggested this in the past but it didn't seem to gain traction so I thought that I would bring the idea up again.  It is just a very annoying feature that could be correct rather easily I would imagine.  It would be nice if Canvas froze everything but the interior page.  In other words, let's say you are in the "Modules" page. When you scroll down, the way it is now everything scrolls and you lose site of your courses, grades, calendar, etc. as well as all of your global settings.  Depending on how long your "Modules" page is, for example, you even lose sight of the left hand navigation tabs as well (Home, Assignments, etc.)  I think that those should be stationary, just as if you were to lock columns or rows in Excel.

Please also refer to this closely related idea: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/6112-make-course-menu-sticky

 

97 Comments
marnie_cedillos
Community Novice

YES PLEASE! I hate having to scroll through the long conversation to get to the menu again. 

DeletedUser
Not applicable

I see a use case for the left-side being sticky, but as an Instructional Designer who also puts custom links in my left nav, I would end up hating it. I have some classes where you have to scroll to access the bottom parts of the left menu because it's so long. If the left side is sticky, then I'm going to have to scroll in 2 different places to access the full length of the page and the menu.

(Also, I actually hate the right side column of Canvas that, especially on the homepage, eats up an ungodly amount of unnecessary space denying us valuable real estate for our home pages!!!)

hensonj
Community Novice

If you have access to the global CSS for your account, the following should be added:

/*removes the max-width so that pages will utilize space on larger screens*/

body:not(.full-width):not(.outcomes) .ic-Layout-wrapper {
max-width: none;
}

Stock Canvas Width

254752_stock_canvas_width.png

Adjusted Canvas Width

254783_adjusted_canvas_width.png

Honestly this seems like a no-brainer to me. Why they restrict how wide the content can be instead of just letting it fill the available space is anyone's guess.

Chris_Hofer
Community Coach
Community Coach

If you don't want to mess with CSS, however, an admin for your school's Canvas instance could enable the "New User Tutorial" Feature Option at the account level which would also display content the full width of your browser window.

James
Community Champion

Canvas did this briefly in a beta release earlier this year and then pulled it back before production to only apply to those who are using the new tutorial. They must have had a reason for doing it, so I would be careful of putting it into the Global JavaScript file. I do, however, have that in my user scripts that are run on my browsers. You'll probably also want to make sure that it doesn't run in an iframe. I don't remember the exact reason, but probably related to speedgrader.  The user script I use is available on my Canvancement GitHub site or here is a direct install link for those who already have a user script manager (Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey) installed

Also, it can be difficult for some people to follow information that far across a screen with the extra white space that gets added, so I can see why they might hesitate to remove the max-width.

hensonj
Community Novice

We have been allowing full width pages since we first transitioned to canvas. Although we needed to change with canvas updates on a couple of occasions, it has not otherwise caused any reported issues.

don_bryn
Community Champion

Yes, that is one of the shortcomings of this voting process:  Unlike a political vote, not every member of the community is aware of a specific topic nor when the deadline for voting is.   In other words, we can have a whole bunch of people wanting the same thing but they don't easily find each other.  One would have to be a good online marketer/politician to really get all those people together to push for an idea.  It seems that eventually on the 5th to 7th reincarnation of an idea it will gain enough visibility to hit Canvas development radar.    Just now there are multiple ideas open for voting that are related, and might not look important due to the number of votes under each idea.    However, if they could all get together it would be much more obvious how important the feature is.

diane_michaud
Community Explorer

It would be nice to be able to turn this option on or off, no?

dunnr
Community Member

This email is no longer monitored as CCSD is moving to google. Rico Dunn can be reached at dunnr@nv.ccsd.net. Please update my contact information.

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Duly noted...  Smiley Wink