Hey, I'm Marc and you have landed on my personal blog
I'm a full-stack developer and open-source maintainer based in Switzerland. Here, I mainly write about Automad and other software development topics. You can find my personal projects here and on GitHub.
When working on the Automad dashboard, I needed a collapsible and sortable navigation tree for the page browser sidebar — something that would feel like a small file explorer inside the browser. My goal was simple: use plain TypeScript, no frameworks, and rely only on native browser APIs.
Open source often comes with an expectation: projects are best built together. And in many cases, that’s true. In my professional life, I collaborate constantly — pair programming, code reviews, team planning. I know firsthand the value of working with others, and I enjoy it.
Long-term open-source projects, such as Automad, require stability and independence from third-party libraries. Relying on external frameworks introduces risks that can impact maintainability, long-term support, and overall project longevity.
As the developer of Automad, I wanted to make working with Automad themes in Neovim as smooth as possible. Automad has its own templating syntax, so I created tree-sitter-automad to provide proper syntax highlighting. Since it’s not yet an official parser, you need to manually register it in Neovim. To speed up template writing, you can also add custom snippets using LuaSnip. Here's how to set everything up.