What's the boring-est way to run Jekyll locally? My main problem with Jekyll is that it required installing (and keeping up to date, I assume) a Ruby environment.

You could leave that to Github Pages, if you have basic requirements. (no extra plugins)

That’s worth mentioning, but I was looking to run the static site generator locally because the workflow of committing to Git, waiting for a build, etc. is too slow for iterating (and also difficult to debug when stuff inevitably doesn’t work as expected).

I have to admit that I found Hugo easier to work with from scratch. I am not used to working with Ruby, so I found setting up Jekyll to be quite an adventure... (now, truth be told, using GitHub to build my pages is definitely easier than having to use my own server with Hugo, but the _initial_ configuration of Jekyll appeared to be more complex for me)

I scripted up a dumb little Python+Jinja transformer with a dumb yaml file for vars. Its like 50 lines of code. Ifs really boring. I also use a little pandoc in my build script

I might give Jekyll another shot, then.

Do it! I'm also currently migrating my old Wordpress blog to markdown in Jekyll using a minimalist theme [1]. I'm liking it so far.

[1] https://github.com/riggraz/no-style-please

I’m a big Jekyll fan too.

If that’s not to your liking I guess you could try pandoc and make.

I’m also a fan of vimwiki, but I guess you have to like vim for that.