Search¶

Zensical offers seamless client-side search functionality, eliminating the need to integrate third-party services that may not comply with privacy regulations. Additionally, the search works offline, enabling you to distribute documentation as a download.

We're interested in your feedback

Zensical ships a completely new search engine that we've written from scratch and we're eager to hear your feedback! We're continuously working on it, and will release it as a standalone Open Source project in 2026.

Configuration¶

The built-in search module is seamlessly integrated with Zensical, adding multilingual client-side search, and is enabled by default, so there's not need for additional configuration.

Search highlighting¶

When search highlighting is enabled and a user clicks on a search result, Zensical will highlight all occurrences after following the link. Add the following lines to mkdocs.yml:

zensical.tomlmkdocs.yml

[project.theme]
features = [
    "search.highlight"
]

theme:
  features:
    - search.highlight

Usage¶

Search exclusion¶

Exclude a page¶

Pages can be excluded from search with the front matter search.exclude property, removing them from the index. Add the following lines at the top of a Markdown file:

---
search:
  exclude: true
---

# Page title
...

Exclude a section¶

When Attribute Lists is enabled, specific sections of pages can be excluded from search by adding the data-search-exclude pragma after a Markdown heading:

# Page title

## Section 1

The content of this section is included

## Section 2 { data-search-exclude }

The content of this section is excluded

Exclude a block¶

When Attribute Lists is enabled, specific sections of pages can be excluded from search by adding the data-search-exclude pragma after a Markdown inline- or block-level element:

# Page title

The content of this block is included

The content of this block is excluded
{ data-search-exclude }