🧵 Spindle

Spindle is a static site generator. It's also a syntax.

Spindle is Night Software. It was designed for me to solve my problems. It's also designed to be accessible to others; you're more than welcome to try and use it.

Spindle the syntax was inspired by the thought of a self-editing Markdown, where both templating and content are defined in the same space, allowing for infinite flexibility with the same basic structure as other tools: define some useful stuff with templating tools, then pull on it to format content.

Unlike Markdown, however, Spindle's syntax is extensible; you can add new tokens on the fly, define as many variations of elements as you like and built consistent, reusable templating that can even change based on context.

Spindle is designed to live in the non-existent no man's land between the ultra-minimal, like Brian Crabtree's clever but constrained sh, and the ultra-complex, like the very powerful but inflexible Hugo. It also wants to do this while being way cooler than any of them.

This new Lua version of Spindle is a partial, simplified rebuild of the previous Go version — it's significantly more powerful than it ever was, despite being 1/5th the size, but it also does less out of the box. Also, this Lua version is very much not finished¹ yet.

Footnotes

1. As if this has ever meant anything. I don't think any version of Spindle has ever been finished. ↩