jolt.nvim

(ab)using nvim for static site generation

why

• I want a simple, static site with code highlighting
• djot has a lua implementation
• nvim has :TOhtml and treesitter
• -> why shouldn't I use my editor to build my site?

Caution

This is janky software I made for myself. There might be hardcoding and assumptions. Commands might not even be wired up to anything. There are no tests. Read before use and use carefully.

workflow

run something like:

nvim --headless "+Jolt build"

and boom! a static site is now available at build/

todo / planned / ideas

loosely ordered by priority

• headless ux should be equivalent to interactive
• code block highlighting based on neovim colorscheme
  • works, but relying on :TOhtml is pretty janky (would need to be properly parsed). look into generating the html myself with treesitter.
    • can you just throw a []u8 at treesitter and get a parse tree back ???
    • this would also make the html a little cleaner
    • support highlight nested captures
      • eg bash var="$VAR"
    • support multi-line captures
      • rust doc comments don't work because the rust parser is trash
• feature-full user commands
  • command line parsing is a little jank, should revisit
• templates: current templates are hardcoded
  • should be able to nest templates
  • templates should be able to be scanned in any order
    • components ???
• watch mode
  • use libuv to watch the uses content dir for changes
  • should be granular if possible, only rebuild what changed
    • support live template changes
  • should be able to serve at the same time
• serve mode
  • run a user supplied system command to serve the build directory locally
  • headless: pass-through cmd output to terminal
  • interactive: display cmd output in a split or tab
• vim docs
• allow sub-dirs to have an index. i.e. /blog/blog.dj and/or /blog/index.dj becomes /blog/index.html
• config options
  • tree-walk build mode: starting from root pages, build the reachable link tree
  • which "url mode": i.e. whether /blog/some-post.dj should become /blog/some-post.html or /blog/some-post/index.html