[Feature Request] Option for TOC as side bar

[somelinguist]

Would you be open to an option to display the table of contents in a side bar that could be toggled?

The use case is that I occasionally work with really long documents with 10s of headings, and it would be useful to have the TOC remain open for navigating back and forth and not have to repeatedly scroll to find the correct heading (which is often the case when opening the menu from the toolbar button).

[cyanzhong]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm hesitant to make such changes to the UI.

However, there's a way works better than "repeatedly scroll to find the correct heading". You can try these shortcuts:

I will skip for now and see if there's more feedback like this.

[somelinguist]

Thanks for the tip about the shortcuts. Those are definitely helpful for navigating between adjacent sections. My thoughts about the sidebar were more about navigating between sections that are more distant. But I understand the hesitancy about changing the UI unless there more similar feedback from others. Thanks!

[somelinguist]

I decided to try around with implementing this myself in my free time, and I've gotten it to at least a working state. My fork at https://github.com/somelinguist/MarkEdit now has a sidebar with a tab controller that can display the table of contents or the statistics view. The style the table of contents sidebar more to my taste :), but the statistics view just wraps the current implementation. Here's a preview:

sidebar-demo.mov

I'm guessing my code needs quite a bit of work still, but I thought I'd share the proof of concept here. I recognize that you might not want to take MarkEdit in that direction at all, and I think that's completely ok! It was a fun feature for me to try to implement myself. :)

[cyanzhong]

Great work @somelinguist!

[somelinguist]

Thanks! I realized I accidentally may have messed up my project file when committing, but I think I've fixed it now. :) Hopefully.