Harp VS Pelican

Sounds like what you want is a static site generator. I've used Harp for a long time but I'm not sure it's really maintained these days, so you might also look at 11ty.

Harp

In my experience, [Pelican](https://getpelican.com/) does a good job of allowing you to edit themes on all pages at once with its static page generator.

There are a lot of built in features designed more for blog-like websites, but I’ve found it pretty easy to make my personal website with it.

Pelican is a preferred option for Python developers.

There's also Pelican but I haven't used it and seeing as Github serves static pages I'd imagine it builds and deploys your page and is done with it.

I use Pelican (https://getpelican.com/) for my blog, which works decently for me. It is a static site generator written in Python.

But you probably won't learn much Python by using it (or Rust when using a generator written in it) since you probably won't need to change anything in it.

Surely a "local private wiki ... not web based ... on a desktop application" is not really a "wiki" at all, but rather a "static site generator" with a built-in "search". If that's what you want, there's a Python app called Pelican. Writing such an app from scratch isn't really a beginners project.

Pelican — best for Python developers

You can - you'd basically just create a python script that parses your HTML/CSS files and replaces strings with values from your YAML. However I wouldn't recommend that unless you're just using this as an opportunity to learn Python. If you want to standup a real site and you want to use python, I'd recommend a Python static site generator like Pelican or Nikola.

As you're familiar with Python, how about https://getpelican.com?