in-popup search excerpt & highlighting?

[adioni]

Context

No response

Description

I've noticed in Material for MkDocs, the search popup shows a short content excerpt for each result, with the matched search term underlined within that excerpt. This gives users pre-click context to evaluate whether a result is worth navigating to.

This is different from the behavior I've noticed so far in my initial tests with zeniscal's current search functionality, which does not have the page excerpt in the search modal, and applies highlighting only on the destination page onlyafter the user has already clicked a result.

Is this functionality currently possible in zensical, and, if not, is it planned at all for a future release?

Related links

• Requesting a change

Use Cases

This in-popup highlighting is what allows users to assess the relevance of a result before clicking through. On a documentation site with many pages, page titles alone are often insufficient to judge whether a given result actually addresses what the user is looking for. The excerpt gives them that signal without requiring a round-trip to the page.

Visuals

No response

Before submitting

• I have read and followed the change request guidelines.
• I have verified that my idea is a change request and not a bug report.
• I have ensured that, to the best of my knowledge, my idea will benefit the entire community.
• I have included relevant links to the documentation and related issues, to underline the need for my idea.

[squidfunk]

Thanks for suggesting. We're still experimenting with the new search, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive in that it's not walls of text to skim through. However, we're considering adding a feature flag to generated excerpts in the future when we continue working on search. I'll create a backlog item.

[squidfunk]

Thanks for the suggestion! We've added it to our public backlog for tracking:

• Search excerpts backlog#121

We can't commit to a timeline or guarantee implementation, but we do read everything and weigh demand when planning.

Staying in the loop

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How we work

Curious about how we prioritize and implement changes? Our how we work guide covers the full process, including how we select requests and work with the community.

[kieran-ryan]

Would second this request - loving Zensical having migrated a few projects. Restoring the user experience for search excerpts would be a desirable quality of life improvement for us - understand why that may not be universal however. ruff is a good example where these excerpts are incredibly powerful to quickly locate relevant content.

Just dropping a comment with feedback of the search tradeoffs we captured when considering holding on migration in case useful; having observed a gap to declare interest (such as upvote) or provide context in the how we work - though respecting and understanding the rationale with the approach.

• Must make assumptions when selecting as to the likelihood of a result containing the intended reference
• Must store mental context of results you have already tried when yet to locate the intended reference
• Must visit all results to understand the breadth and nature of references compared to the snapshot with excerpts

Thanks for making such awesome software. 🥰

[squidfunk]

Thanks for the feedback! We'll definitely add excerpts at some point, but right now we focus on feature parity first, then improve search once we covered enough ground ☺️ We're still a small team, but we'll expand it as soon as our funds allow us to.

[psifertex]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but for me this does sound like a missing feature parity? This is a feature I currently use and appreciate from mkdocs with mkdocs-material and it holds me back from migrating to zensical. Is that not what feature parity would mean? Maybe I'm just using the phrase differently?

Really excited to be getting better search (been watching that old issue for years!) and as I evaluate whether I should just hold out with properdocs or just jump straight to zensical this is currently the only blocker I've found.

[squidfunk]

Fixed in 0baae60. The search interface now renders a fragment of the section for better orientation:

[kieran-ryan]

Fixed in 0baae60. The search interface now renders a fragment of the section for better orientation.

Looks awesome @squidfunk - thank you for implementing! Look forward to using! 🚀