Enabling Local Editing for MkDocs Documentation with IDE

Originally published at https://hopefullysurprising.com.

There are a million good reasons to start writing documentation. Documentation is the key to preserving acquired knowledge indefinitely — for others and for your future self (who might be quite different if things are going well). As essential tool as documentation must promote the idea of keeping it up-to-date by ensuring easy access to editing pages, so that including more details to existing information and putting focus on right things is simple.

While some documentation management systems like Confluence, Notion and others allow in-place content editing, systems with serialisable content stored separately, such as MkDocs, it’s not that straightforward. In this article, we will discuss MkDocs that offers an out-of-the-box solution for that.

MkDocs has the ability to enhance pages with an “Edit” button that allows opening the source code of a specific page in Git repository. However, most guides (including official documentation) focus on scenarios involving cloud-based Git repositories. That’s a quite cool feature, especially, if documentation maintenance is public but that’s not as helpful for maintainers working on pages locally.

In this material, let’s explore how to make “Edit” button open pages in modern…