Is it possible to hide a single file from nav?

[madjxatw]

I see that hide: true could hide a directory from the navigation, but is there any simple way to hide a single file? The regex syntax might be used to filter out a file with a specific name, but I couldn't find an example. Please advice, thanks.

[lukasgeiter]

Not really. The regex might be able to do the trick, but it's not what it was designed for. Can you describe your use-case for hiding a single file?

[madjxatw]

I have some extra documents as supplementary readings, they do not and should not belong to the docs of my project. I only want to reference them from a Markdown file using the Markdown link syntax [](), so I need to make them part of the site but not directly navigable.

I might hide more files and expect a mechanism that works in the similar way as .gitignore where I could simply prefix a symbol (e.g. !) to ignore a file. I am not sure if this feature could be implemented by a plugin, maybe it is not possible due to the limitation of mkdocs itself.

[VladimirFokow]

@madjxatw
Here's an example that I used to put the 'Home' tab first, and then everything else (except for the top-level index.md file):

nav:
  - ... | home/**  # first in the nav order is the 'Home' tab
  - ... | regex=^(?!index\.md$).*  # then, all paths that are not exactly "index.md" of the root

But for your use-case, why can't you put all the files you want to hide into a directory and then just hide this directory?

[madjxatw]

@VladimirFokow, it sounds a good workaround to have a dedicated directory if there is no other better way, thanks!

[madjxatw]

@lukasgeiter , another use case is when blog pattern is enabled, a tags.md file is placed in the docs to make tags in each blog post clickable. See https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/plugins/tags/?h=tags#config.tags_file. I want to include everything excluding the tags file.

[VladimirFokow]

@madjxatw , as far as I understand, you specify

plugins:
  - tags:
      tags_file: tags.md

only once - in mkdocs.yml file.
So there is only one tags_file path that exists - only one page where you see all your tags.

If you want to exclude this page from nav - also put it into that hidden folder?
(just remember to update its path in mkdocs.yml)

[madjxatw]

@VladimirFokow , I am currently using dedicated directories as you suggested for what to be hidden in nav. My site has a complex directory structure, so I create a "hidden" folder in each subdirectory (section) as needed for better organization and managment. Really appreciate your suggestion and awesome-pages plugin!

BTW, I still kind of expect that MkDocs itself offers a feature similar to gitignore in the future instead of .pages files being scattered around. 😛

[lukasgeiter]

Thanks for helping out @VladimirFokow!

Indeed, at the moment a hidden folder is the easiest solution. I've been playing with the thought of adding exclude patterns before, so it's good to know that there's a need for that 👍