The documentation system dilemma: powerful but complex (Sphinx) or simple but limited (MkDocs). Why compromise? With Zensical, we're finally solving this. Full power, zero friction. Here's our roadmap: zensical.org/about/roadmap/

🎄 Merry Christmas 🎅 Zensical 0.0.15 brings fuzzy search support, and improves tooltip behavior on touch devices. The Zensical team wishes you a joyful holiday season and a fantastic new year! 🎄✨ github.com/zensical/zen...

Started prototyping a module system for @zensical.org, and it's so much fun to do this in Rust, just wow! Our aim is to release the first previews early next year in Zensical Spark, so members can try them out for early feedback 🚀 Here are our design goals: zensical.org/about/roadma...

We'll soon ship support for fat fingers – aka fuzzy search. Fuzzy search is particularly tricky to get right, since enabling it generally deteriorates exact or prefix matches quite significantly. Disco only uses it as a fallback, combining it with other matched terms. No special syntax necessary.

Has somebody figured out how to properly cache downloaded and compiled artifacts when using PyO3/maturin-action? github.com/PyO3/maturin...

⚠️ Warning We’ve been made aware of a crypto coin falsely using the name “Zensical.” To be clear: this is a scam, unauthorized, and not affiliated with us in any way. Please avoid and report.

Zensical 0.0.13 is out – our second release today. This release fixes all known issues in the user interface, which means we'll now focus again on the runtime, so we can start working on the module system very soon. github.com/zensical/zen...

Zensical 0.0.12 is out! github.com/zensical/zen...

👋 In case you missed it: 1️⃣ MkDocs unmaintained since 1,5 years 2️⃣ Material for MkDocs in maintenance mode 3️⃣ mkdocstrings in maintenance mode 💀 MkDocs is dead. 🚀 2026 will be the year of @zensical.org

The last two weeks of work just saw the light of day ☺️

Rust is the Drum & Bass of programming languages. Lightning fast, surgically precise, and engineered to flow. Incidentally, I love Drum & Bass.

📣 mkdocstrings is now supported in Zensical! We just shipped Zensical 0.0.11 with initial mkdocstrings support. Features like cross-refs and backlinks are still in progress, but API docs already look great with Zensical. Give it a spin: zensical.org/docs/setup/e...

New pricing page for @zensical.org is live. Using instant previews to surface additional context without disrupting the reading flow – they can be quite effective for progressive disclosure. Documentation for instant previews: zensical.org/docs/setup/n...

Disco is now 3x faster in Zensical 0.0.10! Comparing it to Lunr.js, used in Material for MkDocs, current results are: Indexing: 4x faster Querying: 20x (!) faster This means that Disco can handle much bigger indexes, e.g., 25 MB which roughly equals ~12.000 printed pages.

✨ The first invites for Zensical Spark are going out this week! We're excited to onboard our professional users and begin co-creating the future of Zensical together. Join the waiting list zensical.org/spark/join/

129 people already hanging out in the @zensical.org Discord – a good place to ask questions if you get stuck 👋 discord.gg/hqXRNq9CjT

📣 Material for MkDocs discussion board now read-only. In this fourth and final part of our blog post series, we share our experiences with GitHub Discussions, and what motivated us to rethink the way we work with the community as part of @zensical.org. squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-mater...

Gosh, it feels so good to finally have released Zensical on November 5! Together with the search, we've basically worked in the dark for 2 years – generally a very bad idea, as you can't know whether you nail the problem you're aiming to solve or not. A thread ⬇ 1/4

After a while of Rust, you return to Python or TypeScript with genuine confusion – you can just... pass things around? Without a borrow checker complaining? That's legal?? I mean, who owns that thingy??

Python Markdown Extensions already moved over from MkDocs to @zensical.org 🚀 This demonstrates that existing customizations work nicely in the new design, with only some minor adjustments necessary. facelessuser.github.io/pymdown-exte...

900 stars 7 days after release – I think it's safe to say we had a very successful launch with @zensical.org. We're super happy and the feedback is overwhelmingly positive. Thank you all for supporting our work ❤️

📣 Material for MkDocs Insiders now free for everyone! With 9.7.0, we release all Insiders features previously exclusive to sponsors! This marks the last version of Material that includes new features, as we now enter maintenance mode. A thread ⬇ 1/4 squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-mater...

We're on the HackerNews front page right now! news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4586...

... and the next Zensical release! We'll probably have one every day for the next 10 days, playing whack-a-mole with bugs as they appear, when thousands of Material users test-drive Zensical on their existing projects 😃 Compatibility madness! github.com/zensical/zen...

I just closed my GitHub Sponsors account, saying goodbye to over $16k in monthly sponsorships. These sponsorships allowed me to build a team around Material for MkDocs, and now, Zensical. With Zensical Spark, we're on a new track to OSS sustainability: zensical.org/spark/

Zensical – a modern static site generator. We're excited to release @zensical.org, our new SSG that is compatible with Material for MkDocs: – 5x faster rebuilds – Modern design – Blazing-fast search Read the full announcement on our blog: squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-mater... A thread ⬇ 1/7

If you install a fresh copy of MkDocs, livereload won't work, so MkDocs won't rebuild your project as you make changes. I've updated this reported issue with details on what is happening and how to work around it until the problem is fixed upstream. github.com/squidfunk/mk...

A full-stack day - it started with Floyd-Warshall and ended in navigation icon resolution.

1/2 Phishing by using GitHub issues as a transport – the email looks quite legit, includes a link to a typo-squatted domain (y-comblnator.com) they want you to click on, followed by a lot of whitespace to hide the common GitHub issue footer ⬇️

AI-generated slop as PRs incoming. github.com/squidfunk/mk...

Open Source is not a democracy. It's a meritocracy. Absolute must-watch interview with David Heinemeier Hansson aka DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTa2...

Coming back from preparing new docs for the past 3 weeks with my team, I'm so happy to return to Rust. IMHO, the best programming language of the time. It enables me to think clearly. I've also written some TypeScript lately, and I don't enjoy it as much as I did before Rust.

So seeing the current state of AI, I'm very happy me and my team focused on hard engineering topics around Material for MkDocs in the last 15 months, not building yet another "it has AI now" technology. Close to launch, and no, it's definitely not just a something+AI.

The last missing puzzle piece in making the templates of Material for MkDocs compatible with minijinja.

Several users reached out to us, that a quite fatal bug in MkDocs emerged 10 hours ago that silently changes all URLs to *.html format. Your site will still work, but all links are different. It can be mitigated with "pip install click<8.2.2" github.com/mkdocs/mkdoc...

Very good talk on why OOP was a mistake. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84...

Fascinating how some users choose passive-aggressive entitlement for their very first interaction with Open Source maintainers. Kindness costs nothing. We’re humans, not a support SLA 🫠

Choose your dependencies wisely.

👋 Any other Open Source maintainer here getting tagged on GitHub by users with no public contributions on projects that you do not maintain, asking for you to look into the problem described? What the actual... Always happy to work for free!

I'm astonished some users prefer non-standard (and IMHO noisy) Markdown syntax over plain HTML, with developers going to great lengths coming up with new syntax constructs. In what world is this [↑] better than this [↓]?

My single most effective method for solving complex problems that you're stuck on: going for a run. When I do this in the morning, solutions to problems just pop into my head, and my work day gets a head start. I don't listen to music, I just let the thinking happen.

Time and attention is all you got. Use it wisely. Build epic shit, do things you love. Money is only a means to an end and material things will not make you happy. Just my opinion.

Wow, all my reserved crates on crates.io just got deleted, and one is now used by somebody else. The usage policy of crates.io says that crates are FCFS and ownership transfer is not possible without approval of the owner. Did somebody experience this?

📣 Material for MkDocs Update We're experimenting with alternative ways to manage our public issue tracker. From now on, change requests will be moved to our new public backlog, and prioritized according to our roadmap that we'll release soon ☺️ github.com/squidfunk/mk...

First measurement for the new preview server I've been working on as part of the foundational work on Material for MkDocs: 🚀 50x more req/s than 'mkdocs serve' 🏗️ Extensible middleware architecture 🤏 Tiny, only very few dependencies We're making good progress!

Look Ma, no macros! 🙌 If you need to work with mixed tuples in Rust (varying length and mixed types), the tuple_list crate is absolutely invaluable. It allows you to comfortably work with tuples in generics without writing a single macro. docs.rs/tuple_list/

It's surprising that in 2025, Hugo (Go) and Zola (Rust) remain the only widely-used static site generators with true parallel build capabilities. There's a clear opportunity here ☺️

🐍+🦀 Debugging PyO3 with Visual Studio Code I just created a demo project that shows how to debug Python and Rust in tandem – tricky, but absolutely worth it. It already supports Python scripts and tests. You can find it here: github.com/squidfunk/py...

🚀 Material for MkDocs in-browser configurator by @dbodky.me www.materialconfig.dev

👋 Have two minutes spare? You can help us test some changes we made to our templates to make it easier to explore alternative Jinja-compatible template engines like minijinja (Rust), allowing us to improve rendering performance 🚀 github.com/squidfunk/mk...