Tauri Community Growth & Feedback

Without searching, can you ever find something? And if your telescope is cracked, can you see the planets or stars? We know that our search lens was dusty and scratched; it felt sometimes like a roll of the dice, and some folks even resorted to using ChatGPT to find answers. … ### Search Engine ... Previously, we had a setup that would take our markdown documentation and JavaScript AST and use that to build the search index. Although it led to much faster indexing times, it meant we had a tightly coupled dependency between search indexing and the way we rendered content on our website. This would sometimes lead to the search results getting out of sync with the content on the live website. In order to update the website or optimize the indexer, someone would need to have knowledge of both, making it more difficult to maintain. … The meilisearch/docs-searchbar.js project was good, but I always felt it could use some improvements to get feature parity with algolia/docsearch. I also felt we could help with an update to help with UI/UX. The main pain points with meilisearch/docs-searchbar.js were: 1. On mobile screens, it needed UI/UX improvements so that the search results wouldn’t go off-screen. 2. On desktop, the search results would normally appear under the search input, which in the case of tauri.app was placed on the top-right. This caused a bad UX because you’d have to keep moving your eyes between the page content in the middle and the search results in the top-right. 3. It is missing a common keybinding. `ctrl/command + K` to start the search, `ctrl/command + K` is pretty common in the JS ecosystem documentation sites. It also doesn’t have the ability to select text on the page and then trigger a search directly from that text. I have been always a big fan of algolia/docsearch UI/UX. It checked all the features on my list, and I always wanted to have that for tauri.app. In fact, several months ago, I tried to change the meilisearch/docs-searchbar.js CSS on our end to improve point 1 and 2 above but I stopped mid-way because of the difficulty of building on top of existing css and fighting for highest specifity (plus CSS is hard :wink:). Other projects also couldn’t benefit from our modifications in an easy way.