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If you want to be a cool kid, use this.

https://werc.cat-v.org/

I had to wrangle Pelican into doing what I wanted (a site with multiple pages, all at the same level, and a blog in a sibling directory), but it ended up being Not Pretty.

And Hugo was worse, as the other patrons here have witnessed. It's frustrating.

hey, I very much understand the pain as I was trying a couple of static site generators like 11ty, hugo etc, and all of them are rather bloated and not very intuitive for custom usage.

I looked at your specific question and I think it can work with some tags setup, but then it will probably require some extra JS.

What I can also suggest is to go with markdown and then convert MD to HTML, you can use shell script as starbreaker suggested but I can also recommend just writing one simple JS file where you can use default node fs to list all the files (then you can create an index file to access all pages in the directory) and convert MD with some simple npm package and then just save all results. Then just add some simple css on top to make it look nicer than pure HTML. I bet it can be a very short script tbh.

This is something I'd do with shell scripts called from a makefile, while converting markdown to HTML using pandoc. Of course, the shell scripts would have to use find, sed, grep, and cut to generate the indexes.

Hmmm. I would know how to do this in Hugo, but just getting Hugo set up is an enormous PITA, so I'm not actually recommending it.