Highlight text in search results

[d0ugal]

This was suggested in #624 - we should highlight the search term in the results if we can.

[styfle]

This would be great feature to add and follow similar behavior of readthedocs.org that we expect 👍

[cassiourugit]

Any news on this?
Anyone know if there is a way of doing this today, with some plugin maybe?

[waylan]

Search uses lunr.js which apparently added the ability to support this feature as of version 2.3.8. However, it is not documented yet and enabling it allegedly increases the size of the index substantially. See olivernn/lunr.js#25 for details.

Presumably, the existing built-in plugin would need to be updated to enable the feature. However, I think it should not be enabled by default. A plugin setting would need to be created which would then enable the lunr.js feature. A PR would be welcome.

[pawamoy]

Nowadays (2024) lunr.js is unmaintained (last commit 2020). While we welcome enhancements to existing themes, we're also discussing creating a new, better default theme, which would probably use something else than lunr.js. @squidfunk also stated that he and his team are working on a standalone search plugin that is theme-agnostic and will bring such functionality, see the discussion starting here #3560 (comment).

For these reasons, we'll close this as not planned! If someone wants to work on this anyway, we can re-open the issue.