Multi-file / Folder Assessment Mode for Marked

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Hi Brett,

First off, thank you for building Marked. Combined with a lightweight editor like BBEdit, it remains the absolute best Markdown preview experience out there—especially with native Mermaid support. It completely renders heavy Electron-based IDEs like VS Code unnecessary for my workflow.

I have a specific use case where Marked's "one file preview" model hits a bottleneck, and I’d love to suggest a potential feature or workflow improvement.

The Challenge

I frequently conduct code and project assessments that involve reviewing dozens of generated Markdown files across complex folder structures.

For example, I am currently assessing a report generated by whats-going-on that consists of 76 Markdown files spread across 36 directories (most files are ~10KB, with the largest around 100KB).

Opening, switching, and previewing these files individually one-by-one is tedious, but opening 70+ separate Marked windows isn't practical either.

Feature Suggestions

I would love to see a native way in Marked to handle multi-file reports or documentation suites. A few ways this could look:

  1. Folder / Directory Preview Mode: Allow dropping a root folder onto Marked, rendering a collapsable sidebar/file tree or a master table of contents to quickly toggle between Markdown files in the same window.

  2. Concatenated / Index Preview: An option to open a folder (or a root index.md / manifest) and have Marked temporarily concatenate all child .md files into a single, scrollable preview document.

  3. Multi-Tab Support / Document Drawer: A lightweight tab bar or document drawer to switch between open files within a single window, preserving window positioning and state.

Given how fast Marked is at rendering, being able to seamlessly navigate or aggregate a multi-file Markdown project would make it an unbeatable tool for technical auditing and assessment workflows.

Thanks for considering, and keep up the fantastic work!

1 Answers

I have definitely considered a "project mode" where all of the Markdown/text in a folder is listed in a left sidebar (probably with non-Markdown files there but grayed out). I think this would be more predictable and usable than concatenating a bunch of files, especially considering the order of files in the concatenated document might be unpredictable.

There's already tab support, if you enable it in Preferences, and you can quickly navigate open documents with ⇧⌘O (Quick Open). That might be a good stopgap for you while I mull over a project mode.

You can, by the way, generate an index file for a selection of documents using something like this service. I haven't used it since Marked 2, but I think it might solve some issues for you.