New Features

Public Search Mode

Hister can now run in public mode, allowing unauthenticated read-only access to global search results and previews while keeping write operations protected. This makes it possible to publish a shared or community search instance without exposing private user data. Public mode is documented across configuration, server setup, user handling, and the new public search blog post.

Documentation Datasets

Hister now ships dataset metadata and tooling for importing common reference documentation. New datasets cover Go standard library, PowerShell, Python, Rust, Node.js, and refreshed MDN datasets. Compressed dataset imports are supported, so pre-built documentation archives can be imported directly.

StackExchange Extractor

The StackOverflow extractor has been replaced by a generic StackExchange extractor. It supports StackExchange-style question pages more broadly and indexes answers with useful metadata.

Markdown and Org Mode Extractors

Local Markdown and Org files now render as HTML previews. Markdown titles are extracted automatically, Markdown syntax is stripped from indexed text, and Org files are rendered through go-org for cleaner previews.

MCP History and Capability Reporting

The MCP endpoint now exposes a get_history tool for recently indexed pages and opened search result history. MCP search supports date filters, and MCP clients can discover whether semantic search is enabled on the current Hister instance. The MCP documentation and examples have been expanded accordingly.

Browser Extension Hotkeys and Indexing Indicators

The browser extension now includes configurable commands to manually index the current page, disable indexing for the current page, and disable indexing for the current domain. Badge feedback indicates success or failure. The extension can also show whether the current page has already been indexed, with a popup setting to control the indicator.

Import and Export Improvements

Imports now support HTML files, multiple input files in a single command, compressed JSON archives, directory imports for supported local file types, and optional user IDs. Import and export commands can be limited by date range. Browser history import gained a redesigned interactive flow and a --backend flag for selecting the scraping backend.

Search JSON Output

The /search endpoint now supports format=json, making it easier to integrate Hister search results with scripts and external tools.

Search Sorting

Search results can now be sorted by newest date, domain, and most visited pages. Documents track an add_count field that records how many times a URL has been indexed, and the web UI exposes this as the “Most visited” sort mode.

History RSS Feed

The history endpoint and history UI now expose an RSS feed for recently indexed documents.

Enhancements

• File indexing startup: initial file indexing now runs in the background so server startup is not blocked by watched directory indexing (closes #499)
• Directory indexing queue: watched directory indexing uses a proper queue, logs queue errors, and avoids duplicating file indexing logic
• Sensitive content override: CLI indexing can explicitly allow sensitive content when requested
• Semantic search: embedding generation has a concurrency limit, semantic result counts are more accurate, and shared plus user-specific vector results are merged
• History view: the history timeline has been redesigned, supports loading more items, shows when a day has unloaded items, and displays indexed version counts
• Search UI: the results layout, home layout, dark theme, add entry form, search input, and shared chrome have been refined
• Facets: type facets were added, inactive facet categories are hidden when they only have one candidate, and facet rendering was refactored
• Preview and history integration: history supports diff previews for versioned documents, preview links are proper anchors, and previously opened results stay visible after unpinning
• Configurable branding: the web UI title and subtitle can now be configured
• Logging: log output format and log file path are configurable, and panic stack traces are available in debug logs
• Environment variables: environment variable overrides now preserve typed values instead of treating everything as a string
• Terminal UI: the TUI package now lives under cmd/tui, includes updated command documentation, and supports result sorting
• CLI structure: the command line implementation was split into a dedicated cmd package for easier maintenance
• Docker image: yt-dlp is now installed in the Docker image
• Dependencies: Go, npm, GitHub Actions, Nix, GORM, SQLite, and PDF related dependencies were updated

Bug Fixes

• Lobsters extraction works with the updated Lobsters HTML structure
• Document labels are added and preserved correctly
• Opened history filtering and history list layout no longer squeeze content
• Result text wraps correctly in the web UI
• Description lines no longer force table scrolling
• Base URL handling is more consistent for app URLs, CSRF checks, and invalid base URL values
• The preview panel is cleared when a search returns no results
• Reindexing no longer stops when an extractor aborts one document
• Lazy loading works when the previous page returned fewer than the configured page size
• Database migrations no longer unintentionally update UpdatedAt
• PDF parsing panics are recovered, and PDF dependency updates address memory issues
• Versioned document diffs use the newly stored document when calculating changes
• Batch operations handle user IDs correctly
• Extra documents no longer increment the parent document add count
• Subtitle rendering is centered correctly
• Python dataset generation fetches only standard library documentation
• Nix paths and hashes were updated after Go and npm dependency changes