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@1.3.0

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 deterministically. The Lua filter reads the project type from QUARTO_EXECUTE_INFO at render time and injects a small JSON configuration block into the page head:

<script id="quarto-remember-config" type="application/json">
  {"project-type":"book","page-exclude":[],"separate-chapter-state":false}
</script>

remember.js reads that block at startup, so detection no longer relies on theme-specific DOM selectors and survives theme changes, custom HTML layouts, and SPA-style navigation.

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).

Configuration

All options are optional and live under extensions.remember in either the document front matter or a project _quarto.yml.

extensions:
  remember:
    page-exclude:
      - /drafts/*
      - /search.html
    separate-chapter-state: true

• page-exclude is a list of pathname patterns to opt out of persistence. Each entry is matched against window.location.pathname as a literal substring or as a glob where * stands for one path segment.
• separate-chapter-state (default false) stores the current chapter of a Quarto book independently from the scroll position inside that chapter, so a return visit can offer to reopen the previous chapter even if the user did not scroll.

Limitations

• Only works with HTML-based output formats (html, revealjs, and book).
• Requires browser support for localStorage. Private browsing modes that throw on write are detected at startup and the extension disables itself silently with a single console warning.
• For regular pages, position is tracked per pathname. For books, position is tracked per book (all chapters share the same tracking by default).
• Project-type detection requires Quarto to populate QUARTO_EXECUTE_INFO, which it does for every supported render path.

Example

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

Output of example.qmd:

• HTML
• Reveal.js