Create a “Featured” Column in Quarto Listings

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

For the listing of my Zettelkasten, I wanted a way to feature certain Zettel. To do that, I created a custom key-value pair in the YAML header of the Zettel that I named spotlight so that it will be invisible in the listing, and I set the value to a star emoji ⭐:

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

Then, in the YAML header of the listing page, I set the fields key to include the custom key-value pair:

---
title: "Zettelkasten"
listing:
    page-size: 1000
    sort: 
      - "date desc"
      - "subtitle desc"
    sort-ui: [subtitle, reading-time]
    type: table
    filter-ui: true
    categories: false
    fields: [subtitle, title, spotlight, date]
    date-format: iso
---

See how it renders: