Representing Directory & File Structure in Markdown Syntax

Question

I want to describe directory & file structures in some of my Jekyll blog posts, does Markdown provide a neat way of outputting such a thing?

For example, you can see at this link on the Jekyll website that the directory & file structure is output on the page very neatly:

.
├── _config.yml
├── _drafts
│   ├── begin-with-the-crazy-ideas.textile
│   └── on-simplicity-in-technology.markdown
├── _includes
│   ├── footer.html
│   └── header.html
├── _layouts
│   ├── default.html
│   └── post.html
├── _posts
│   ├── 2007-10-29-why-every-programmer-should-play-nethack.textile
│   └── 2009-04-26-barcamp-boston-4-roundup.textile
├── _data
│   └── members.yml
├── _site
└── index.html

I believe the line block characters above are Unicode (as described in this answer here), but I am not sure how Markdown or different browsers will handle them. I was hoping that Markdown had included some way of doing this which outputs as the Unicode characters above perhaps.

Solution 1

If you are concerned about Unicode characters you can use ASCII to build the structures, so your example structure becomes

.
+-- _config.yml
+-- _drafts
|   +-- begin-with-the-crazy-ideas.textile
|   +-- on-simplicity-in-technology.markdown
+-- _includes
|   +-- footer.html
|   +-- header.html
+-- _layouts
|   +-- default.html
|   +-- post.html
+-- _posts
|   +-- 2007-10-29-why-every-programmer-should-play-nethack.textile
|   +-- 2009-04-26-barcamp-boston-4-roundup.textile
+-- _data
|   +-- members.yml
+-- _site
+-- index.html

Which is similar to the format tree uses if you select ANSI output.

Solution 2

I followed an example in another repository and wrapped the directory structure within a pair of triple backticks (```):

```
project
│   README.md
│   file001.txt    
│
└───folder1
│   │   file011.txt
│   │   file012.txt
│   │
│   └───subfolder1
│       │   file111.txt
│       │   file112.txt
│       │   ...
│   
└───folder2
    │   file021.txt
    │   file022.txt
```

Solution 3

If you're using VS Code, this is an awesome extension for generating file trees.

Added directly to markdown...

📦quakehunter
 ┣ 📂client
 ┣ 📂node_modules
 ┣ 📂server
 ┃ ┗ 📜index.js
 ┣ 📜.gitignore
 ┣ 📜package-lock.json
 ┗ 📜package.json

Solution 4

You can use tree to generate something very similar to your example. Once you have the output, you can wrap it in a <pre> tag to preserve the plain text formatting.

Solution 5

As already recommended, you can use tree. But for using it together with restructured text some additional parameters were required.

The standard tree output will not be printed if your're using pandoc to produce pdf.

tree --dirsfirst --charset=ascii /path/to/directory will produce a nice ASCII tree that can be integrated into your document like this:

.. code::
.
|-- ContentStore
|   |-- de-DE
|   |   |-- art.mshc
|   |   |-- artnoloc.mshc
|   |   |-- clientserver.mshc
|   |   |-- noarm.mshc
|   |   |-- resources.mshc
|   |   `-- windowsclient.mshc
|   `-- en-US
|       |-- art.mshc
|       |-- artnoloc.mshc
|       |-- clientserver.mshc
|       |-- noarm.mshc
|       |-- resources.mshc
|       `-- windowsclient.mshc
`-- IndexStore
    |-- de-DE
    |   |-- art.mshi
    |   |-- artnoloc.mshi
    |   |-- clientserver.mshi
    |   |-- noarm.mshi
    |   |-- resources.mshi
    |   `-- windowsclient.mshi
    `-- en-US
        |-- art.mshi
        |-- artnoloc.mshi
        |-- clientserver.mshi
        |-- noarm.mshi
        |-- resources.mshi
        `-- windowsclient.mshi

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