I installed Treemacs the other day and found out, to my excitement!, that you can not only hit TAB to expand folders, but also to expand files! When you “expand” a Markdown file, you see its headings in the file explorer. That is bonkers, and so useful for larger writing projects to get a unified overview!

I’ll definitely write more about this once I figure out how to make the setup simple and appealing enough to emacs newcomers.

In that process I noticed that for my blog here and on zettelkasten.de I’m using YAML frontmatter for the page title, and then level-2 headings to add structure to the document. This produced a bug in the generated outline. That’s not Treemacs’s fault, though, it was a bug in markdown-mode regarding the outline generation. The outline is represented as “imenu tags”, whatever that means in detail.

After I figured this out and reported an issue, it took only 3 days for a fix to arrive.

Consider this to be a little ad hoc love letter to Open Source.

If you’re an emacs user, I’d like to encourage you to check out markdown-mode from GitHub and play with Treemacs for a while.