mkdocstrings VS furo

Mkdocs has the mkdocstrings plugin, offering limited automated API documentation capabilities. It is however nowhere near as capable as Sphinx' autodoc, missing granularity in its configuration, limited intersphinx-like cross-referencing support, and essential features like documentation of inherited members, or the ability to manually describe objects if needed.

mkdocstrings works well, although it is not as powerful as the API documentation in Sphinx.

Author of Materia for MkDocs here. MkDocstrings [1] implements automatic generation of reference documentation from sources. It's language-agnostic, actively maintained and currently supports Python [2] and Crystal [3]. It also integrates nicely with Material for MkDocs.

[1]: https://mkdocstrings.github.io/

Some time has passed since I first introduced mkdocstrings here on reddit. If you don't know what mkdocstrings is: it's the equivalent of the autodoc Sphinx extension, but for MkDocs, a Markdown static site generator. It works differently though, and supports multiple languages by design (not only Python). Someone actually wrote a very good handler for the Crystal language, and another user on GitHub recently expressed their interest for writing one for Go.

Write proper docstrings as you go along (every time you write a new class/method/function you can document what it’s doing as you’ll know why and what from the pattern you chose). Using a tool like mkdocstrings makes maintaining documentation for larger projects automatic.

I learned of https://github.com/pawamoy/mkdocstrings recently. Is it similar ?

A user of mkdocstrings wrote a Crystal handler for their own use-case. They asked on the Gitter channel if we could allow to load external handlers, so they don't have to fork the project and install the fork, but rather just install their lightweight package containing just the handler.

Sphinx has more and in my opinion better themes (especially the popular Furo them). I also think it's better for handling large and complex sites. It's way more extensible. That there are far more Sphinx users means that you're more likely to have community support if/when you run into issues.

My company uses sphinx, in particular the furo theme: https://github.com/pradyunsg/furo. I'd like to use something like this to start documenting our Rust repositories. Is this possible on stable?

On another note, what did you dislike in Sphinx ? I found it pretty easy to work with until now and there are quite nice themes, like Furo (https://github.com/pradyunsg/furo), which is actually pretty similar to your current docs theme. I used it recently for one of my projects (see https://francois-rozet.github.io/piqa/piqa.psnr.html).

reminds me a lot of Furo which is used by big names such as urllib3, pip, attrs, psycopg3, black

This theme was created by one of the maintainers of pip, which is where I first saw it (https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/). Here are some of the things I like about it:

- Well-chosen, proportionate font sizes and spacing.

- Table of contents sidebars for both the current page and the whole documentation site.

- Fully responsive: sidebars disappear in narrow windows or small screens, but can still be popped out.

- Clean color scheme with good contrast, and full support for dark mode (see screenshot at https://github.com/pradyunsg/furo/blob/main/README.md).