Omar AntolínFeb 22

Why do I keep seeing people that use #Emacs #OrgMode with an external static website generator, usually Hugo, to make a website? Is there something wrong with the org-publish subsystem that comes with org-mode? It seems to work well to me.

Or maybe there's nothing wrong per se with org-publish, but Hugo is somehow better? I can't really imagine Hugo is more extensible than org-publish, but maybe it's better in some other way?

Show threadChristian TietzeFeb 22

@oantolin I assume this is not snark, but a genuine question :)

So Hugo has a long tradition of generating static sites in a way that gels well with how people would want their websites to look and be generated. Rather large community for such a niche project, too.

Then there's the lure of CI/CD pipelines to auto-generate the website as you edit your repository from anywhere. That ought to be possible with emacs and some scripting, too, but Hugo's CLI is made for that

Show threadHauro
@ctietze @oantolin I think this is pretty much it. While it is relatively easy to learn #orgmode, it is way harder to learn #elisp. I work with CS students and aspiring PhDs regularly, and most have never seen a Lisp-y language before. The CI/CD feature and documentation for Hugo are appealing. They already know that. Besides, Hugo supports Org, Asciidoc and Markdown. From my experience, people use Hugo with Markdown first, and then switch to Org because they're looking for better ways to write.
Feb 22 at 9:20amWeb
Show threadOmar AntolínFeb 22

@hauro @ctietze I hear this "harder to learn Elisp" pretty often and find it surprising. Emacs Lisp is a normal programming language, with numbers, strings, lists, arrays, hashtables, and functions; it supports imperative and functional styles. Don't your CS students already know a language with that description, such as Python? It is true that Emacs Lisp has some features that are uncommon in non-Lisp dynamic languages, like macros and variables with dynamic scope (but those two features might be the full list!). Maybe I've forgotten what it feels like to learn hwo to use those features, but I don't think it was particularly difficult.

I can understand the appeal of a CI/CD workflow to generate a website. Somebody else mentioned it here and it is something I had not considered. And I do know Markdown is very popular. (My website used to written in Markdown and converted to HTML by Pandoc.)

Show threadHauroFeb 23
@oantolin @ctietze I totally get it, and am with you on that. (I also do not teach, I just work with them.) I think that the problem, if we want to call it that, is that the environment is different. They start in VS Code. If they ever get curious about Org, they install the VS Code extension. You can tell them about Emacs, but that is a "bad" experience for them: It looks ugly, behaves weird, and uses a strange language... Whereas other solutions "just work". It's hard to get into all of that.