You may be interested in some background.
Navigation in Gramps initially only recorded people. The navigation buttons allowed the user to move to the previous, next and default person.
When the gramplet bars were introduced, we needed a way of signalling the current object changes for the other primary objects types. The easiest way to do this was to create history lists for each primary object type. This created an independent navigation for each object type. There was no way of recording that a user had changed view from a person to an event for example.
The Combined View was created to demonstrate two ideas:
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That a view could display data from more that one primary object. I wanted to show that it was possible to display citations and media attached to events quickly. This really expanded upon an earlier prototype which I referred to as “viewers”. Viewers would be optimised to view data, whereas an editor would be optimised to edit data. I later concluded that a viewer could probably just be a view.
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That it was possible to navigate from one object type to another. For example from a person to an event and then to another participant in the event. The problem here is that I created a totally new combined history object that is only created when the view is created. At some point I intend to put a multi-object history into core Gramps which will work better.
I have another set of views, one for each object type, that display all the data stored in Gramps. I call these the Everything View, but it is not published yet. Users can follow links from one object to another, but I haven’t implemented navigation yet. It is a similar concept though.