Founder of @zensical.org, creator of Material for MkDocs
Martin Donath
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Very proud of the team today: we’re launching Zensical Studio. 👏
A lot of work went into making this fast, precise, and useful in real documentation projects. If you write docs with @zensical.org or MkDocs, we'd love your feedback!
Zensical Monthly 04/2026
AI agents don't stop when your docs have a gap. They guess – confidently, fluently, and wrongly. This month's Zensical Monthly is about what that means for technical writers, and what we're building about it.
Web version:
mail.zensical.org/monthly/2026...
Zensical 0.0.39 is out – a bugfix release smoothing out edges on link validation and the new lightbox integration.
github.com/zensical/zen...
Zensical 0.0.42 improves stability and accuracy of link validation, and fixes some bugs related to file watching, abbreviations in the table of contents, and GLightbox.
Release notes:
github.com/zensical/zen...
Zensical 0.0.44 brings further improvements to link validation. You might have noticed we've been quieter than usual – we've been heads down on a major milestone for Zensical. We'll share everything in Zensical Monthly, our newsletter, on June 10!
github.com/zensical/zen...
Zensical 0.0.40 is out with macro support. You can now use macros inside Markdown files and even docstrings – a much-requested feature that was never possible with mkdocs-macros.
Release notes:
github.com/zensical/zen...
Writing Rust in Zed – boy, can it get any better than that?
Martin Donath
Pretty happy with how this turned out! We found so many issues in our own docs when dogfooding – unresolved links and unused definitions that had been silently hiding for months. 😅
Zensical 0.0.37 adds support for installable themes – you can now package your existing customizations into a theme that can be installed via pip exactly as with MkDocs.
Read the release notes:
github.com/zensical/zen...
We got some heat for warning our users that MkDocs 2.0 won't have a plugin system in Material for MkDocs.
The maintainer just confirmed it again and is actively working on MkDocs 2.0 – no plugins, by design. Markdown + templating only.
github.com/mkdocs/mkdoc...
Summary
This version fixes several bugs related to link validation and lightbox configuration.
Changelog
Bug fixes
fe42fc4 compat – shim for MkDocs validation syntax overrides Zensical's (#607)
ac...
Summary
This version includes a number of bug fixes and refactorings to improve the stability and accuracy of link validation, and fixes a reload loop when the custom_dir, which is auto-watched, is...
Summary
This version fixes several bugs related to link validation and macros, and ensures that dotfiles are not removed from the site directory during generation.
Changelog
Bug fixes
eb72115 comp...
Summary
This version adds support for macros, covering the functionality of the mkdocs-macros-plugin. Macros allow you to define custom variables and functions that can be used in your Markdown fil...
Summary
This version adds support for installable themes. You can now bundle your theme overrides and package them into a custom theme which can be installed via pip.
As of now, we closely mirror t...
ImportantNothing in this post is official. It's a simple Request for Comment to see what the communities overall opinion is about MkDocs current maintainership, and if there should be a change. It ...
Today, we're launching Zensical Studio, the missing productivity layer for Docs-as-Code. The idea is simple: Refactor documentation like code. Rename headings safely. Catch [broken links] instantly.
Works with Zensical and MkDocs projects. zensical.org/studio/
