Disable highlighting for web search results

[adeak]

I've always been bugged by the fact that sphinx search results automatically highlight the search hits on the target page. This usually looks like this:

Note the noisy highlights of each appearance of "plot", even in the left sidebar in unrelated words.

I've done some digging and it seems there's no way to disable this feature altogether, at least I couldn't find anything in the sphinx docs nor in the pydata-sphinx-theme docs. I did find a workaround in this Stack Overflow answer that suggests hacking the highlight colour to be transparent in CSS.

So this PR does exactly that by creating an auxiliary .css file (similarly to the one we already have for the copy button), and injects it in conf.py (the same way that we do for the copy button). The result is nice:

But note that this will still have the ?highlight=... parameter in the URL, it will merely be a no-op. This is not great but I prefer this to the working highlight feature.

Furthermore, I don't actually know what I'm doing here (at all!) so labelling this as review-critical 😅 And of course if you think we should keep the default highlighting (cc @pyvista/developers) then we can just close this.

[akaszynski]

Always thought it was annoying as well, but I didn't think much of it. Good idea to disable.

Implementation is a hack, but it's documented and I don't think we should worry about it being perfect.

[adeak]

I just noticed that I copied over a syntax error from the answer on SO... let me rebuild the docs to make sure it's still working. It'll take a while.

[akaszynski]

It'll take a while.

I'd like to take some time this release to improve our doc build time. 30 minutes isn't great for CI/CD.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

Merging #2007 (217ecd9) into main (1990b01) will not change coverage.
The diff coverage is n/a.

@@           Coverage Diff           @@
##             main    #2007   +/-   ##
=======================================
  Coverage   93.06%   93.06%           
=======================================
  Files          74       74           
  Lines       15527    15527           
=======================================
  Hits        14450    14450           
  Misses       1077     1077           

[larsoner]

I'd like to take some time this release to improve our doc build time. 30 minutes isn't great for CI/CD.

FWIW in MNE-Python for a few years now we have only built on CircleCI (which builds our docs) the examples that have been modified, which makes the doc build much faster (< 10 min rather than ~2 hours for a full build). Then all main builds are full. (Or at least they used to be -- nowadays we actually just do nightly ones.) It might be an option here, too. It ends up working pretty well because you can ask people to either make minor changes to examples expected to change, or push a commit with [circle full] to build all examples.

Code here if interested:

• https://github.com/mne-tools/mne-python/blob/main/.circleci/config.yml#L2
• https://github.com/mne-tools/mne-python/blob/main/tools/circleci_download.sh

[adeak]

It'll take a while.

I'd like to take some time this release to improve our doc build time. 30 minutes isn't great for CI/CD.

Oooh that would be nice :) You have my full support!

---

The workaround still seems to work after rebuilding with the CSS syntax fixed. Developer tools shows no warnings related to that part of the CSS, and the style editor shows that the default colour is being overridden by our CSS snippet:

So I think it's working. Hopefully without subtly breaking anything else.

[akaszynski]

LGTM. Thanks!