Navigation
The sidebar tree, breadcrumbs, and page ordering.
Sidebar tree
The sidebar shows a collapsible tree of your vault. Each Markdown file is a page, and each folder is an expandable group. Folders sort alphabetically with subfolders first, and the tree remembers what you expanded.
| File | Where it appears in the tree |
|---|---|
content/index.md | The home link at the top |
content/guides/setup.md | guides → setup |
content/guides/index.md | makes the guides folder clickable too |
Controlling the order
By default, a leading number on a file or folder is used only for ordering — it is stripped from the URL and the sidebar label:
| File | URL / label |
|---|---|
content/01_Home.md | /home / Home |
content/02_Guides/01_Setup.md | /guides/setup / Setup |
content/02_Guides/02_Deploy.md | /guides/deploy / Deploy |
This documentation uses exactly that trick — the folders are named 01_getting-started, 02_writing, and so on, which is why they appear in this order.
If you would rather keep the numbers in your URLs, turn this off in silica.config.ts:
export default defineConfig({
ordering: {
numericPrefixes: false,
},
});Breadcrumbs
Pages inside folders show breadcrumbs above the title so readers know where they are. A breadcrumb links only when that folder is itself a page. The home page has no breadcrumbs.
On mobile
On small screens the sidebar tucks behind a button in the header, and search stays one tap away.