ENH: Include navbar in the left sidebar on home page

[choldgraf]

This is a minimal change needed to make the navigation links show up in the left sidebar only on the root page.

It's on by default, which I think is reasonable. Even if the links are redundant with the top navbar on the root page, that is still probably better than an awkward white space. And if people want to remove them, they can do so via:

html_sidebars = {root-doc-name: []}

New behavior:

Old behavior:

closes #221

[choldgraf]

This is just a quick implementation to see if people like it. Another option could be to provide a new configuration feature like homepage_sidebar_links.

[choldgraf]

I am gonna close this PR, since it was just opened as a demonstration, not something ready to be merged, and since I've got a bunch of other PRs open that I think should have precedence over this one :-) we can use it as a reference though!

[jorisvandenbossche]

I certainly agree it would be good to do something about the by-default odd looking home page. But I am not fully sure duplicating the navigation is necessarily the best option.
We discussed this before somewhat at #146, and looking back it seems we concluded there that you can hide the sidebar with sphinx' sidebars option, and if there is no sidebar, we make the main content a bit wider.

Maybe we should make use of that in our demo docs? Although the question is then where to put the search box? (somewhere on the main page content?)

[damianavila]

Interesting discussion, should we capture that in a new issue since #146 is already closed?

[choldgraf]

@damianavila or in #221

[jbednar]

I'd strongly vote for doing something to avoid having the very first page of each site look so unbalanced; it seems like an error on every site where I have seen it, including our own, like https://hvplot.holoviz.org. Putting the top-level TOC there makes good sense and makes it stop looking so bad (which happens for some reason on holoviews.org already). I think it's also ok to simply suppress the sidebar on the main page, but I had the same worry as Joris about what happens to the search bar. Maybe just move the search bar to the right sidebar, on all pages (not just the home page)?

[damianavila]

@jbednar, I made a reference to your comment in #221, and maybe we can continue the conversation there. Thanks!
Btw, nice to see you here 😉

[jbednar]

Hi! :-) Sounds good!