Pagefind

In 2025 I relaunched Control-Escape as a statically generated site built with Hugo. While pre-generated sites have many advantages, one of the drawbacks has traditionally been the difficulty of implementing a site search tool.

With no back end server process to conduct searches, an alternative approach must be used. One such approach is to run the search software in the user’s browser using JavaScript (shifted right). This requires building a search index at site build time (shifted left) and shipping that index as part of the site content.