[rich-iannone]

Quarto rebuilds a page's whole sidebar on every page that shows it. On a large API this takes much of the render time: for a large API's reference sidebar it could list about 1,500 links, and every reference page has to render it. This PR has Quarto render each long reference sidebar once and then copies it into the pages that show it.

Before rendering, each reference sidebar (reference, cli-reference, mcp-reference) is copied to a full gd-full-<id> sidebar. Only a one-page template shows that copy, and the original sidebar keeps just the links the navbar needs, so Quarto renders a short sidebar on each page. After rendering, a post-render script (share-sidebars.py) takes the full sidebar from the template and puts it into each page. It marks the page's link as current, opens the sections around it, restores the search crumbs Quarto takes from the sidebar, and removes the template from the site and sitemap.

Pages aren't edited: the sidebar is named through the directory's _metadata.yml, so freeze caches stay valid. Normal builds run this just before rendering, and versioned builds run it in each version's directory.

The output matches a plain Quarto render: every page is byte-identical, and the search index holds the same entries. On a 303-page site with a 300-link reference sidebar, quarto render went from 241 to 145s (about 40% faster). Larger sidebars should save more. Sites with short sidebars (such as this one, with 14, 32 and 24 links) render in about the same time as before. A full versioned build of the Great Docs site succeeded, with the full sidebar and the right current link on the API, CLI and MCP pages in every version.

[github-actions]

📚 Preview this PR's docs locally

Fetch the just-built site and open it in your browser:

# this exact build
great-docs preview --run 39994553024

# or always the latest build for this PR
great-docs preview --pr 413

Auth & tips

• Requires great-docs: pip install great-docs (or run via pipx/uvx).
• Auth: run gh auth login then add --use-gh, or set GITHUB_TOKEN (needs Actions: read).
• Jump to a page: add --path reference/index.html.
• Latest vs exact: --pr <n> grabs the newest build; --run <id> pins this one.
• Re-download: --refresh ignores the local cache.

[has2k1]

LTGM.

Though I am surprised there is no related issue at quarto-cli.