Outline Panel

The sidebar "Outline" tab shows the heading structure of the current document, letting you see the skeleton of a piece at a glance and jump to any section. It also doubles as a "relationship overview" for the current note: its top sections show the local graph and linked references as needed.

Note

"Outline" is one of the sidebar's five tabs (Files / Search / Outline / Bookmarks / Tags), and is placed in the right sidebar by default.

Panel Structure

After opening the "Outline" tab, the page shows several sections from top to bottom depending on the current note:

Section Contents When it appears
Graph The current note's local graph (depth-1 neighborhood: the note + direct neighbors + the edges among them) When the note has incoming or outgoing links
On this page The current note's heading outline Always
Linked references The list of WikiLink outlinks in the current note (deduplicated, in order of appearance) When the note contains [[...]] outlinks

For how to use the local graph and linked references, see 03-Knowledge-Management/03-Backlinks.

Outline (On this page)

What It Does

  • Automatically parses Markdown headings (levels 1–6)
  • Indents by heading level so the structure is immediately clear
  • Clicking any heading scrolls the editor to that position
  • When a document has no headings, it shows the hint "Use # heading syntax to create an outline"

Heading Levels

The outline supports all six heading levels:

# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3
#### Heading 4
##### Heading 5
###### Heading 6

The Graph Section

The section header has two buttons:

Button Description
Expand / collapse the local graph Show a small neighborhood graph of the current note inside the sidebar
Open the global graph Open the full 03-Knowledge-Management/04-Knowledge-Graph
Tip

If a note has neither outlinks nor any note referencing it (an orphan), the Graph section is hidden entirely — which is itself a signal that it's time to add some links.

Auto-Expand on Startup

With "Expand outline on startup" enabled in the "Behavior" group of 07-Settings/01-General-Settings, double-clicking a .md file to open it in this app automatically expands the sidebar and switches to the outline view.

Use Cases

  • Navigating long documents: with thousands of words, the outline beats scrolling by a wide margin
  • Checking structure: outline before you write, then verify completeness as you go
  • Jumping to sections: one click, no manual searching
Tip

The outline shows "the structure of a single piece," while the 03-Knowledge-Management/04-Knowledge-Graph shows "the relationships between notes" — the two complement each other.