Search

[Fil]

For mid- to large projects, we'll need search; like vitepress we could build a search index with minisearch.

Design considerations:

• Indexing happens in a data loader
• Search happens on the client
  • we're careful not to download the index before the user shows an intent to search (e.g. first char typed in the search input, or on focus)
• We want command-K to open the sidebar (if it isn't already) and focus the new search input.
• Typing shows a list of matching pages; maybe with some kind of "relevance score"?
• Is this a modal or a new page?
• A URL such as /search?{query} would be helpful to make it possible to share and program a browser shortcut
• Getting content snippets is possible, would be nice to have.
• How to keep the contents relatively fresh in preview?

[Fil]

upping priority

[ramonaisonline]

Cross-posting from Slack:

Okay here are a few mockups! I wasn’t quite sure what was happening in that screenshot — will the results appear inline in the side panel? Or will they appear in a modal?
Also, would it detect multiple matches on a page? If so, are there multiple extracts? If we can incorporate multiple extracts into the results, I think that’s helpful, though as a fall back the match count (or even just a single extract) might be helpful.
I mocked up some quick ideas for both inline results and a modal:

[Fil]

we'll start with the inline version; rationale (by @ramonaisonline):

in the inline version your focus isn’t jumping around and so that you can click between the results while reading the pages. but if we decide we want to do other command-palette-y stuff later we can come back to the modal design!