isIndex

[Its-Just-Nans]

What version of starlight are you using?

5.15.8

What is your idea?

Relate to #3556 (comment)

Having a isIndex field to replace the index.mdx

Index.mdx as default index are nice but we end up having many many files named "index.mdx" which is counter productive where searching for them

This isIndex field allow to have any file as index

Why is this feature necessary?

Not having too much "index.mdx" in the project

Do you have examples of this feature in other projects?

No response

Participation

• I am willing to submit a pull request for this feature.

[HiDeoo]

Thanks for the feedback 🙌

Only sharing a small tip I've used in the past to make it easier to navigate with such files: custom editor labels which is available in multiple editors including VS Code.

When you have multiple files with the same name, you can apply a custom display label for those files. For example, in the case of multiple index.md files, you add the following settings:

{
  "workbench.editor.customLabels.enabled": true,
  "workbench.editor.customLabels.patterns": {
    "*/**/index.{md,mdx}": "${dirname} (${filename}.${extname})"
  }
}

Here is a comparison of how tabs look before and after applying this setting:

Before	After

This also works when searching files to open via the command palette (Cmd+P):

Before	After

[Its-Just-Nans]

That's nice for VSCode

But if I don't want index.md(x), and have the test.mdx instead

The URL will be

• example.com/guides/test <- if we use index.md(x) or the proposed isIndex
  instead of
• example.com/guides/test/test

[delucis]

You could use Starlight’s existing generateId() API for changing slugs here maybe. That would let you have test/test but output test:

docsLoader({
  generateId: ({ entry }) => {
    const pathWithoutExtension = entry.split('.').slice(0, -1).join('.');
    const segments = pathWithoutExtension.split('/');
    if (segments.at(-1) === segments.at(-2)) {
      segments.pop(); // discard last path segment if directory and filename match
    }
    return segments.join('/');
  },
})

I personally try to avoid customisations like this because the more the file system naming and the URLs diverge, the harder it can be to understand how file names influence URLs, but definitely an option if you need this!

[Its-Just-Nans]

Good to know

but this not solve the multiple index.mdx ^^

[Its-Just-Nans]

Or what about a "slug" props ?

[delucis]

Yes, you could also use slug in frontmatter, that's already supported!