Folder workspace

Single Markdown files are fine for a quick look. For anything bigger — a notes vault, a project’s docs tree, a manuscript — open the whole folder as a workspace. You get a sidebar, table of contents, frontmatter panel, recent-folders list, and cross-file wikilinks.

Open a folder

⌘⇧O (File → Open Folder…) opens a folder picker. Pick a directory; Sigla opens it as a workspace with its sidebar populated.

You can also:

• Drop a folder onto the Sigla icon in the Dock.
• Open a folder from the command line: mdv ~/notes/.
• Pick from File → Open Recent Folder (or the Recent Folders menu inside the same submenu).

Multiple folders can be open at once — Sigla supports multi-root workspaces. When folder names collide (two folders called docs/ open at the same time) the title bar disambiguates with the parent directory.

Close a folder

⌘⇧W (File → Close Folder) closes all open folders. Individual folders close from the sidebar’s section header.

The sidebar

The sidebar shows your folder’s Markdown files in a source-list outline. By default the sidebar is hidden and slides in when you hover the left edge of the window — keeps the document focus uncluttered. Pin it open via ⌃⌘S (View → Toggle Sidebar).

What’s shown

• Markdown files (.md, .markdown)
• Subfolders, lazily enumerated as you expand them

What’s hidden

The following are filtered out of the listing:

• Any file or folder starting with . (hidden files)
• .git, .DS_Store, .vscode, .idea
• node_modules
• Build output: .build, DerivedData, target, dist, build
• __pycache__
• Non-Markdown files (images, JSON, etc.)

The filter is hard-coded to avoid scaring users with multi-gigabyte enumeration of node_modules. If you need to see a non-Markdown file, open it directly with ⌘O.

Live updates

Sigla watches the workspace via FSEvents. Files added, removed, or renamed externally (in your editor, in Finder, by git pull) reflect in the sidebar automatically.

Recent Folders

File → Open Recent Folder lists folders you’ve recently opened, sorted by recency. The list persists across launches. “Clear Menu” wipes it.

OPEN section

The sidebar’s OPEN section lists files you’ve recently viewed inside the workspace. The active document is highlighted; when you switch folders, the previously-active document is automatically promoted to OPEN in the new folder so it stays one click away (when present in that folder).

Per-file scroll position

When you switch between files, Sigla remembers where you were in each. Switching back restores the scroll position. This is per-file, persisted across launches, and works across the entire workspace.

To return to the top, scroll there manually — there’s no “reset” command.

Document history

⌘[ (Go → Back) and ⌘] (Go → Forward) walk through documents you’ve opened in the current window, the same way Safari and Finder do. The hidden alternates ⌘← and ⌘→ work too. A two-finger horizontal trackpad swipe drives the same history.

This is per-window, not per-workspace.

Frontmatter panel

If your Markdown files have YAML frontmatter (a ----delimited block at the top), Sigla extracts it and shows it in a panel on the right side of the window.

Open the frontmatter panel with ⌥⌘I (View → Show Frontmatter Panel).

The panel shows every key/value pair from the active file’s frontmatter. Click any value to search the workspace for files with the same key/value pair — this is the entry point into Search and find.

YAML parsing is conservative — values are stored as strings, lists of strings, wikilink references (when the value is [[…]]-shaped), or nested mappings. Mapping values expand inline: a links: { github: https://…, features: https://… } field renders as one key: value chip per entry. Scalar values that are http(s):// URLs render as accent-tinted chips with a 🔗 glyph and open in the system browser when clicked, regardless of whether they’re top-level, list items, or object entries.

Wikilinks across the workspace

Inside an open folder, [[other-doc]] and [[other-doc|display text]] style links resolve across the workspace.

Bare-name targets ([[notes]]) match by filename, with the .md / .markdown extension inferred. When multiple files share the basename, Sigla picks the one closest to the file you’re reading (prefer-nearest by directory distance) and flags the rest as alternates in the tooltip.

Explicit-path targets ([[team-b/index]]) are tried against three locations, first hit wins:

1. Relative to the current file’s parent directory — [[team-b/index]] from team-a/notes.md finds the sibling team-b/ folder.
2. Relative to the workspace root — for paths you’d write at the top of the tree ([[docs/glossary]] from a README).
3. Walking up ancestor directories toward the workspace root — handles deeper trees where the explicit path is rooted at some intermediate ancestor.

Anchors ([[notes#install]]) are appended after the path resolves and matched against the target file’s heading slugs.

Broken wikilinks render with an amber tint, dashed underline, and a trailing ⚠ glyph. The tooltip names the missing target. Ambiguous wikilinks get a dotted underline and ◆ glyph. Missing heading anchors get a dashed underline alone (the file exists; only the heading didn’t resolve). The bottom status bar surfaces a link-integrity summary for the active document.

Outside a folder workspace (single-file open), wikilinks render as plain text — Sigla has nowhere to resolve them.

What persists

Inspect with defaults read com.slantedt.sigla.

Cross-references

• Search and find — cross-folder search and the frontmatter-click flow
• Keyboard shortcuts — every folder-related shortcut