Afridyne Blog

Search Better, Faster, Smaller

New Search Blog Post

This is the story of how we managed to completely rebuild client-side search, delivering a significantly better user experience while making it faster and smaller at the same time.

The search of Material for MkDocs is by far one of its best and most-loved assets: multilingual, offline-capable, and most importantly: all client-side. It provides a solution to empower the users of your documentation to find what they're searching for instantly without the headache of managing additional servers. However, even though several iterations have been made, there's still some room for improvement, which is why we rebuilt the search plugin and integration from the ground up. This article shines some light on the internals of the new search, why it's much more powerful than the previous version, and what's about to come.

Zensical

A modern static site generator built by the Material for MkDocs team

We are thrilled to announce Zensical, our next-gen static site generator designed to simplify the process of building documentation sites. Distilled from a decade of experience, Zensical is our effort to overcome the technical limitations of MkDocs, reaching far beyond its capabilities.

  • Zensical is the result of thousands of hours of work – built from the ground up for a modern and comfortable authoring experience, while making it easy for developers to extend and customize Zensical through its upcoming module system. Our goal is to support docs-as-code workflows with tens of thousands of pages, without compromising performance or usability.

  • To make the transition seamless, compatibility comes first. We're putting significant effort into ensuring a smooth migration from Material for MkDocs for all users. Zensical can natively read mkdocs.yml, allowing you to build your existing project with minimal changes. As of now, a subset of plugins is supported, and we're working on feature parity in the coming months.

  • Zensical is fully Open Source, licensed under MIT, and can be used for any purpose, including for commercial use. We're also saying goodbye to our sponsorware model, replacing it with our new offering for professional users: Zensical Spark. This allows us to stay independent, maximizing user value, as we shape the future of Zensical together with you.

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What MkDocs 2.0 means for your documentation projects

Last update: April 13, 2026 – see update log.

MkDocs 2.0

Three weeks ago, MkDocs 2.0 was announced – a ground-up rewrite of the documentation tool tens of thousands of projects rely on, introducing potentially significant breaking changes.

Material for MkDocs depends on MkDocs as its underlying framework and central dependency. We maintain Material for MkDocs, but we have no control over MkDocs itself.

We've taken the time to thoroughly evaluate and test the MkDocs 2.0 pre-release and want to share our findings, including what it might mean for your documentation projects, and where Zensical, our new static site generator that is compatible with MkDocs 1.x, fits into the picture.

If you've missed it: MkDocs 1.x is unmaintained, with issues and PRs piling up and no releases in the past 18 months, and seemingly no plans to fix long-standing issues like live-reload problems. More importantly, it's unclear whether security issues will be addressed, and whether the project will receive any updates at all in the future.

Please note that MkDocs 2.0 is still in pre-release, and the information in this article is based on the current state of the project. We keep it updated as we learn more.