Zensical
Zensical is the successor of Material for MkDocs that built on MkDocs. I migrated my stuff over to this drop-in replacement that is actively developed.
Installation
There are many possible ways to install the tool and its dependencies, see the getting started guide of Zensical. The description below illustrates two possible ways, using a virtual environment or a conda environment.
Tip
Going the conda environment route, you create a conda environment that can be used for every Zensical project, while the virtual environment is project-local.
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install zensical
# Create conda environment and activate it
conda create --name myenv
conda activate myenv
# Install latest Python 3.14
conda install python=3.14
# Install zensical
pip install zensical
Setup a project
Now its time to fire up a new project using zensical:
mkdir myproject
cd myproject
# Activate your chosen environment
# It's probably wise to version the project
git init
echo "site/" > .gitignore
# Now initialize a mkdocs project
# and add the files to the git index
zensical new .
git add .
git ci -m "Initial empty Zensical project"
The journey just started, best to continue the getting started guide of the Zensical website.
The usage, setup and reference guide of Zensical are superb places to get an overview of possible style elements like admonitions, lists, formatting etc. and how to achieve them. Also look into the cheat sheet with all stuff in action.
To publish the generated static pages, either deploy manually or setup a GitHub action. This is on page Publish your site.