glassknife VS zim-desktop-wiki

Same for me. I wrote a little Python script to copy my Obsidian files into a set of Hugo files, then publish them. Proprietary or not, it's so easy to work with the files that things like this are possible. It's my data in my favorite format, ready for use with all the existing text manipulation goodies I already know. There's not much to improve on there.

Plug: I wrote a couple of other scripts and put them on GitHub[1]. If you use Drafts and its "Quick Journaling" action group[2], then `process-notes` will look awfully familiar.

[1] https://github.com/kstrauser/glassknife

I'll slightly modify your argument; because Pure HTML does suck:

Why don't people make static sites with a simple "Markdown-or-Similar to HTML" converter, CSS, and vanilla JS...etc?

(This is what I do, btw -- http://zim-wiki.org + a template)

You should add Zim [1] to the "Personal Knowledge Management" section :)

[1] https://zim-wiki.org

https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

And I just tweaked the CSS and added a bit of logic to included the possibility of one image per slide; as well as editing slides not with raw HTML but with https://zim-wiki.org (because that's what I'm really used to, I'm sure any Markdown thing would work just as well).

Absolutely; recently I realize I wish I'd never learned vim. I use too many other programs that are at least CUA-ish ( http://zim-wiki.org is the most important app I use ) and now I kind of want out. I haven't yet tried Modeless Vim, but that looks like my next experiment.

https://github.com/SebastianMuskalla/ModelessVim

It is so hard not to feel REALLY SMUG reading stuff like this, as someone who has run my own website as the working primary source for my college instruction for the past 15 years or so using https://zim-wiki.org. (before Markdown was much of a thing!)

It's borderline bizarre to have watched this method of doing things kind of die out, and then also come back in the form of "static site generators" -- which, frankly, are still way clunkier than this.

Write in Zim, export to html, rsync to site. Easy.