Static Website Generators --- Which one?

sed -e '[email protected]/* */@/markdown page.md/e' template.html > page.html

Really, sed + markdown + make already gets you very far. And that's just to help you organize a little. If you're making a blog, you might want some extra metadata and generate an RSS.
Really, there's tonnes of ways to do it, but it all boils down to your organizational preferences. Just write your damn pages already and use whatever shitty language you take the cock from to merge different files together into your static pages. You don't need frameworks and random shit. It's fucking HTML. Worst case you just have a few templates you copy every time you add a new page, and do everything manually.

gohugo.io/

Op here. So far I do it manually, converting txt files to html and inserting into a simple html template. I will check out your solution. Thank you.

I also found this, which seems simple enough for my needs

>pdsite is a Pandoc-backed static site generator for Unix-like systems (including OSX, Linux, and BSD). It's comprised of a single shell script and has no dependencies on particular programming environments: it arose out of a desire for MkDocs-like functionality with broader input format support and without the Python dependencies. pdsite.org

Why is it better than 100s other solutions?

dev has a whole blog about it, generated with it.
Read some of it.

?

I use Pelican, it's pretty nice, but whenever I find myself wanting to make an actual website where I have pages, images and other resources in a certain hierarchy I find myself fighting the generator. But if you want just a glorified blog it's great:
blog.getpelican.com/

I particularly like that it supports reStructedText, it's a much better format than Markdown. As with everything, you get an opinionated solution and the more you try to move away from the standard opinion, the harder you have to fight it. My ideal would be a sort of composable static site generator where every feature is a plugin and you assemble the plugins in any way you want. Of course it should come with a sensible default set of plugins, but it should make no assumption about how those are arranged.

Op here. So far in this thread
suckless
Jekyll
vim plugin
sed
Hugo
Pelican

Thank you for all your suggestions so far. Im on holidays without a pc, so I will try it all when I get home.

+1 for Maven

Op here. Thank you, but isn't it too large and complicated for what I'm trying to achieve with my website? Link to Maven maven.apache.org/maven-features.html

My aim is to generate a website with links to articles (mainly text) and creating pages with said articles. Maybe adding categories and some metadata about authors and sources.

I just use github.com/audreyr/complexity which does the job of simple html templating well enough. It has a few... weird... features though, like expanding things from "item.html" into "item/index.html" all the damn time unless you tell it not to. At least it's not horribly intertwined with blog structuring like most of the competition.

It's a feature not a bug.

Op here. Thanks I will check it out when I get home in a week.

Pico. Pico is fucking awesome. Plus you can template it super easy. I used to do webdev in the 2000s, stopped giving a shit, and I was just going to load templates on it and never edit them because USUALLY editing or creating templates makes me think of lots of better things to be doing.

But it's actually really great and I know eventually I'll be drinking coffee and writing a template that looks exactly how I want.

www.cantkill.me

(of course I believe the pinnacle of blog/article website design was steakandcheese.com circa 2000)

web.archive.org/web/20000621191126/http://www.steakandcheese.com:80/

er okay maybe Pico isn't a "static site generator" but it's fucking great for what you want to do

...

I like Urubu

Urubu is probably for you, here's why:

jandecaluwe.com/blog/i-dont-like-blogs.html

tl;dr
it's actually more of a general-purpose static _website_ generator, not just a static _blog_ generator, which is what most of the so-called static website generators really are.

Emmet is a text editor plugin that expands abbreviations to HTML. It's essentially a collection of snippets. I don't think that's what OP is looking for.
Emmet has plugins for various text editors, not just vim. In fact they list their vim plugin as a 3rd party developed one that doesn't even support all it's features.

Thank you. Pico looks really good, but I'd rather avoid any need for php in this project.

How is grunt relevant to my nimble website with text?

After reading about Urbu it seems like something that can meet my needs. Simple and seems to do the job. Thank you.

Op.

github.com/BennyHallett/obelisk

Thank you. Op

Op here. After trying several suggestions and not being satisfied (mostly because templates weren't suitable to my needs, and seemed too complicated to change) I wrote my own generator script in bash as suggested by .

General idea

I'm sure it could be done in a better and more efficiently, but what I made meets my needs.

stop this

Yeah, that's the thing with templates, you always get someone else's opinion of what a web site should be like. I wrote my own templates, it's really not that bad and I got full control over the elements of the website.