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Simple, index-free text search for JavaScript, used across my personal projects like YC Vibe Check, linus.zone/entr, and my personal productivity software. Read the annotated source to understand how it works under the hood.

More formally, libsearch exposes a single API, the search function. This function takes two required arguments and two optional arguments:

libsearch ships with TypeScript type definitions generated from the source file. Using libsearch from NPM should get them picked up by the TypeScript compiler.

libsearch lets you perform basic full-text search across a list of JavaScript objects quickly, without requiring a pre-built search index, while offering reasonably good TF-IDF ranking of results. It doesn't deliver the wide array of features that come with libraries like FlexSearch and lunr.js, but is a big step above text.indexOf(query) > -1, and is fast enough to be usable for searching thousands of documents on every keystroke in my experience.

Modern JavaScript engines ship with highly optimized regular expression engines, and libsearch takes advantage of this for fast, index-free text search by transforming query strings into regular expression filters at search time.

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