Create a “Featured” Column in Quarto Listings

I use Quarto to generate my website, which includes my notes.

For the listing of my notes, I wanted a way to feature certain notes. To do that, I created a custom key-value pair in the YAML header of the note that I named spotlight, and I set the value to a star emoji ⭐:

---
title: "The `hosts` File as a Self-Care Hack to Block Distractions"
subtitle: "Note#156"
id: "156"
date: 2024-06-01
date-modified: ""
date-format: iso
categories: [notes]
spotlight: "⭐"
---

Then, in the YAML header of the listing page, I set the fields key to include the custom key-value pair, and I hide it with a non-breaking space character:

title: "Notes"
listing:
    ...
    fields: [id, title, spotlight, date]
    field-display-names:
        spotlight: " "

See how it renders: