visual-studio-codemarkdown

Markdown headings not appearing in outline box in VS Code

While editing a markdown document in VS Code, the outline box does not show me the outline of the markdown document; it's completely blank/empty. I've disabled all extensions with no change in behavior (and I only had one markdown-related extension anyway, markdownlint). I don't know that this has ever worked, but it certainly has not for the last several months.

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Solution

  • Out of the box, Markdown headings should show up in the outline view as text nodes:

    VSCode outline pane showing three headings

    If the outline view is configured not to show strings, Markdown headers won't appear.

    Take a look at the Outline: Show Strings setting in your preferences and make sure it's enabled.

    This setting is called outline.showStrings. If you wish to enable it only for Markdown files, you should be able to disable the feature globally and then add something like this to your settings.json:

    "[markdown]": {
  "outline.showStrings": true
},

    It's probably easiest to start by running Preferences: Configure Language Specific Settings... in the command palette and then selecting Markdown.