Have a search bar

[mdinger]

Having a search bar would be very very useful. rustbyexample has one for example. I'm not sure how it would be implemented. I'm sure this has long been wanted by the rust book.

Being able to search for programming keywords would actually make it very unusual and better than most too (outside the scope of a regular search bar though)

[azerupi]

A search bar would indeed be very useful, but I don't think it's trivial to implement.

Ideally there would be some priority, like this:

Sidebar title > h1 > h2 > h3 > h4 > ... > bold > other text

that would require to parse the markdown a second time, maybe we can hook into the parser from pulldown-cmark without the renderer?

Being able to search for programming keywords would actually make it very unusual and better than most too (outside the scope of a regular search bar though)

A more general approach could be to specify high priority keywords in book.json. I am not sure how difficult that would be and how well that would work though.

[steveklabnik]

👍 this is something people have asked from rustbook forever see rust-lang/rust#22786

[asolove]

Is anyone else interested in working on this? If not, I might take a crack at generating a naive search index and seeing how it works on the rust book.

[azerupi]

I have exams until end of January, so.. be my guest! 😉

I think using lunr.js has been considered in the past, so maybe take a look. But if you have other ideas, go ahead. I haven't done a lot of research about the subject.

If you have any question about the project, or you want to share advancement on this matter, feel free to post here! Good luck 👍

So I just noticed I can't search the Rust reference anymore, which isn't really helpful.

Looking already existing search frameworks has resulted in these:

• Tantivy (nightly Rust and optional C++ for SIMD)
• lunr.js
• Elasticlunr.js

Using Tantivy would require compiling to asmjs (I guess around 10MB), or rewriting the search functionality in JS. And the search index needs to be deployed with the book.

With the two JS variants the situation is a bit different: The index could be generated during compilation with node.js, or when the book is opened.

I personally prefer the last option. It saves space for the Index, does not introduce additional build dependencies and the search framework can be easily updated.

[azerupi]

So I just noticed I can't search the Rust reference anymore

I wasn't aware there was a search functionality in the old reference? Or was it just the browsers ctrl-f? Because in that case there is a workaround, the 'print' icon in the upper right corner redirects to a page where all chapters are displayed on one page that can be ctrl-fed.

Granted, it's not intuitive and a real search functionality would be better :)