zim-desktop-wiki VS zimfw

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.

FWIW, I've been using http://zim-wiki.org for YEARS. (Sites a little messy and I need to clean it up, but it's extremely functional,) I host my college classes websites from it, to the point that I forced myself to learn the Canvas API, to just clone the page from this site to the front page of Canvas and change the links so they come back here.

jrm4.com

More on topic, I use zim, but mostly write my own plugins/modules/ad-hoc/post-hoc scripts

I’m using zimfw Flexible and fast. https://zimfw.sh

I was using oh-my-zsh as my plugin manager for a long time and startup speed was probably much slower than fish (although normal usage wasn't) because omz enables a lot of features and plugins I didn't need/use. I went to prezto and then antigen as plugin manager and for the last couple years I have been using zimfw, which is great compromise between a plugin manager that can add and update plugins, and literally just generating a small bootstrap script that just sources the plugins and otherwise is entirely out of the way.

zsh with zim framework

switch to zsh isntead of bash and use pre prepared framework for it, I like zim zsh

I moved most of my config over to zim -- been pretty happy for the most part. I see that zinit got forked, which makes me happy, that was a mess and what made me look elsewhere. Hopefully the new committers can do it well.

zimfw