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.

Search is currently only available in English

At the moment, the search interface is not localized, since it's an entirely new implementation. Thus, it does not make sense for us to carry over the search localization from Material for MkDocs, as its tightly coupled to the old search implementation, and we're still changing too much.

This does not impact multi-lingual search.

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 your configuration:

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 }