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Comment by clintonb | Hacker News Reader

Why should anyone use this over Jekyll or any of the numerous other static site generators?

Jekyll doesn't work on Windows last time I checked, not without going through a long list of steps. It also needs a Ruby runtime.

It does work on Windows, but it's a pretty unpleasant process, particularly if that's your only reason for installing Ruby (i.e. you aren't doing any actual Ruby development and just want to run the site generator).

I was collaborating with a bunch of people on a website designed to use Jekyll and I got really tired of talking Windows users through the point of installing the whole Ruby environment just so they could generate content. It's a huge hurdle to have to get non-developer users over.

It does work on Windows, and is fairly easy. It's true that it needs an entire Ruby environment.

WSL at least makes it a lot easier to maintain the ruby environment and keep it up to date (especially for tracking GitHub Pages) as you can follow Ubuntu instructions. Jekyll is definitely my largest use for WSL.

That's true. I don't use the WSL anymore though, still works.

It is more annoying than something like Gutenberg would be though.

Yes, for now the lazy convenience of being able to use GitHub directly as my "CMS" makes it worth the hassle to work with Jekyll and Ruby in WSL for those rare times when I need to do larger changes and make sure that I preview them locally.

This is a huge advantage for Jekyll, as it makes it easy to add new content to my site from anywhere. I don't need access to my computer.

I wish GitHub would support other SSGs in the same manner that GitLab does.

For one thing it is a single binary, which is much easier to handle than, say, jekyll, for people that do not use ruby

So is Hugo, and that's in Homebrew for macOS users.

Not one "binary" but one thing? https://github.com/jekyll/docker

That's essentially what I had to do[1], it's not ideal but it works. I was looking at switching to Hugo, but this static site generator looks promising.

[1]: https://blog.jvtrigueros.com/2017/07/12/jekyll-docker-enviro...

Right. You still need docker for that, though

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