Outline Writer

Display text outline, gathered from files with synopsis in YAML front matter.

Get started

1. Add YAML front matter to your text files, for example:

   ---
   title: Get started
   synopsis: Describes how to get started
   ---
   

2. Add an .outline file in the root of the directory where the text files are located.

   Each line should be a relative path to a file that should be included in the outline, for example:

   ./0. Foreword.md
   ./Chapter 1/1. Getting started.md
   ./Chapter 1/2. Moving on.md
   ./Chapter 2/At the disco/Dancing.md
   

   To easily generate the .outline for all Markdown files recursively in a directory:

   $ cd <project directory>
   $ find . -name "*.md" | sort > .outline
   

   The outline file may also contain inline notes, which can be created by prepending the line with note::

   ./0. Foreword.md
   ./Chapter 1/1. Getting started.md
   ./Chapter 1/2. Moving on.md
   note: We can have some notes inlined here as well.
   ./Chapter 2/At the disco/Dancing.md
   note: We're done!
   

Features

This extension supports the following fields in YAML front matter:

• title: May be empty, defaults to the filename.
• synopsis: May be empty, defaults to empty string.
• color: Background color (only applies to HTML format) in CSS hex color format. May be empty, defaults to transparent.
• date: May be empty, defaults to empty string.

The generated outline is accessible either via the Activity Bar, or via the context menu when right-clicking a .outline file in the File Explorer.

Extension Settings

This extension contributes the following settings:

• outline-writer.outlineFormat: which format the outline should be rendered as.
• outline-writer.defaultColor: default color for items in the outline (only applies to HTML format)
• outline-writer.noteColor: color for notes in the outline (only applies to HTML format)

Icon

The icon of this extension is a derivative of "Pen by VectorsLab from the Noun Project", used under CC BY.