[Navigation] How to extract the title of markdown as the name of the navigation tab?

[icefery]

Is there any configuration that allows the title of the markdown to be the name of the navigation tab?

site/
|--docs/
  |--tab1/
    |--a.md
    |--README.md # title is 'Navigation Tab One'
  |--tab2/
    |--b.md
    |--README.md
|--mkdocs.yaml

theme:
  name: material
  language: zh
  features:
    - navigation.tabs

[alexvoss]

Hi, is this your complete mkdocs.yml? I am asking because it consists only of the theme section. That means that the navigation would be auto-generated by MkDocs because you don't have a nav section in your configuration. That means that your navigation will be sorted alphanumerically by filename. If you want to have the title of README.md be the tab label then you need to use the navigation.sections feature and set up a nav section with the README.md files as index pages.

If you don't want to manually curate the navigation, you can have a look at the awesome pages plugin.

[kamilkrzyskow]

To merge the sections with the index pages, so that they use the title from the page, the navigation.indexes is needed:
https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/setup/setting-up-navigation/#section-index-pages
navigation.sections changes the appearance of the left nav.

EDIT: It changes the appearance of the left nav, but doesn't override the title, as I initially thought, please read the comment below.

[alexvoss]

Ok, sorry, I should have played this through. It actually is not possible because by virtue of creating the section in nav:, the section title is defined in the mkdocs.yml, so will not be taken from the README file. I saw people suggesting making the name of the section and empty string but that did not work for me and, in any case, would probably be relying on undocumented behavior.

@icefery, if you really need these titles to come from the README.md files you will need to see if the awesome pages plugin I mentioned can do the trick.

Also be sure to be aware of how MkDocs deals with README.md files.

Hope I was holding the correct end of the stick this time...

[icefery]

Thank you for your reply, but that is not what I need. As @alexvoss said, there seems to be no way here, except nav config.

[kamilkrzyskow]

I'm surprised my previous comment is incorrect, I was sure that navigation.indexes would merge the file with the navigation item and override the title with it. However, when I tested it now, the item is merged, but the name isn't 😮

So it turns out that you'd have to use theme overrides:
https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/customization/#extending-the-theme
and override the tabs-item.html to prioritize the page title.

Here is an example:
tabs-index-name.zip

From testing it turned out that MkDocs itself already makes sure that thet index.md and README.md already have higher priority over other files and therefore are first in the list by default. So there is no need for the navigation.indexes setting to merge the page with navigation section header. The tab will point to index.md or README.md in that order.

Of course this setup assumes that README.md does exist ^^