Improving Search functionality for Documenter.jl

Final Work Report for the Google Summer of Code 2025 under Julia

Abstract

In this project I had to improve the search functionality of documenter so I did the following things :

  • The first thing I did is to create some benchmarks to test that upcoming improvements.
  • Then I created a test manual and tested it on the benchmarks.
  • Then I created a custom tokenizer so that you can now search symbols along with text and the search result now come based on a priority list which is based on user's preference.
  • Next I investigated how can I make the search index better so me along with my mentors finalized to remove the page category from the search index and make everything a section to reduce the search index size and make the search much more intuitive.
  • Also now documenter gives you warning when your search index size exceeds a specific threshold.
  • I also created a developer doc for explaining how search functionality works in Documenter.
  • One of my mentor suggested that we should add navigation functionality using keyboard in the search modal so people can navigate using up and down keys so I did that

Pull Requests

Contributor Info

Mentor's Info

GSoC Project Page

GSoC Project Proposal

This site is a collection of notes, progress reports for the 2025 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project by @Rahban1, mentored by @mortenpi and @Hetarth02.

I thought it would be a good idea to document my journey using Documenter itself, also I was inspired by my mentor Morten who did the same :)