// the find
algolia/autocomplete
🔮 Fast and full-featured autocomplete library
A TypeScript library for building autocomplete search boxes, split into a framework-agnostic core (autocomplete-core) and a ready-made DOM renderer (autocomplete-js). It suits teams that want keyboard handling and accessibility attributes without writing them by hand, and that are fine supplying their own sources and markup.
- The core/renderer split is the right cut. autocomplete-core owns state, sources and keyboard handling with no DOM assumptions, so you can render with React, Preact, Vue or plain JS without working around the default markup.
- Sources are plain functions that return items, so a static list, recent searches and an Algolia index can share one dropdown as separate sections. The plugins (recent searches, tags, redirect URL) hook into the same state instead of forking the component.
- The examples directory is unusually useful: more than twenty runnable apps, including panel placement, a preview panel inside a modal, result merging with Reshape, and a Slack-style emoji picker that positions itself from caret coordinates. That is where the non-obvious behavior is actually demonstrated.
- CI runs a compressed-size check on changes, which matters for a widget dropped into other people's pages. The repo was pushed to as recently as September 2026.
- The README is mostly links to algolia.com. Option semantics, state shape and the plugin lifecycle live on the docs site, and the playground links point at the next branch rather than main, so you can end up reading one branch against docs written for another.
- The most useful pieces (query suggestions, the preset, click tracking) assume an Algolia index. Outside Algolia you are back to writing your own sources, and many examples import Algolia's search client directly.
- Choosing autocomplete-core means writing the renderer yourself. The examples I could see are React, React 17 or plain HTML/JS, with no Vue or Svelte example, so those users are working from the core docs alone.