Why & how did you choose Saber?

[egoist]

I would like to hear from the community's opinions about Saber and the way you ended up choosing it.

Please answer the following questions:

1. Why do you like Saber?

E.g. what are the features that you appreciate the most, why you prefer it over other projects, why would you recommend it to someone else, etc..

2. Where did you find Saber?

E.g. where did you hear about Saber for the first time

[krmax44]

1. It has all the features I needed compared to other Vue.js static site gens. Gatsby is cool but too complicated for what I wanted to achieve plus I'd have to learn an entire stack. Nuxt is clumsy when it comes to blogs and has poor plugin support, Gridsome is lacking fully featured page transitions and I'm not a fan of GraphQL when it comes to simple sites like blogs. VuePress' blog support is in the planning phase but it might become an interesting option down the road. The simple API, general ease of use and set of features made the decision for me.

2. On staticgen.com

[kidonng]

1. Better support for blog is what Saber appeals to me most among Vue-powered static site generators, since I'm familiar with Vue 🤗
2. https://www.h404bi.com/

[chawyehsu]

Interesting discussion.

1. Actually, I've written something about why I choose Saber - https://www.h404bi.com/blog/2019/04/recent-changes-of-my-site (in Chinese). But I'm glad to talk about it again in English.

   I've stuck in Hexo for several years since I started to use the static-site generator. The technology is changing fast, especially the ❤❤❤❤ing Front-End domain. I need to push my stuff into the new era, just as what they said in https://vuepress.vuejs.org/guide/#hexo.

   React is great, and Gatsby is cool. However, it's too complicated for me. I'm not good at its tech stack, it takes me time to learn and control many things - React stack, GraphQL, etc. All of them AT THE SAME TIME. It beat my passion for migrating my site (yeah, I've tried the migration). I still on the way to the mountain of React though.

   VuePress came out. Really nice and I could use what I've learned to build up my new front page. But it has few blog support, and you'll find it's some times hard to migrate your Hexo blog to VuePress. The ecology is growing, they are working on it - Blog Support roadmap.

   Before I found Saber, I knew Peco (I'm sorry for reminding your dead project, EGOIST). The comment in my issue in that project expressed my mind at that time.

   I was considering to migrate my Hexo blog to Gatsby, then I found this. It looks neat to me, and is similar to Hexo in some way.

   Then Saber came out, I was hyped. And I thought it's time to move. Awesome. So what are the features that you appreciate the most? The answer is SIMPLE BUT POWERFUL. Simple, I can migrate my stuff from Hexo to Saber smoothly, the theme, the structure, the content. Powerful, the simple API makes me happy. I can easily make some small plugins to satisfy my needs, and I've even published several plugins, cool! (tapable supercharges Saber)

2. So the other question - Where did you find Saber? Where did you hear about Saber for the first time?

   Your old project: Peco.

P.S. @krmax44 Thanks me (netlify/staticgen#492)

[Morgul]

I'll jump into the mix.

1. For me, the simplicity was what attracted me immediately to the framework. I could start with just a markdown file in a pages folder, point saber at it, and I've got a static site. That super low bar for entry is a huge win. Then, when I wanted to do more exciting stuff (like code 90% of the smarts for a site into the theme for terrible reasons), having basically no restrictions on that has made me gain a huge preference for saber over my previous static generator, Nuxt. (I've never felt like saber's fighting me, until Nuxt that always feels like a battle between rivals.)

   But that's not the only thing; I need to be able to use Vue components, and I need something that doesn't require much upkeep. The extra power from the wonderful hooks system, or the Plugins API is just icing on the cake.

   At the end of the day, I feel like if I wrote a static site generator, what I'd end up with would work a lot like saber. Not exactly the same; I would only support .md or .vue files, for example, and probably wouldn't abstract out the renderer... but that's because I'd be building it for me, not a wider audience.

2. I first heard about Saber on news.vuejs.org. I've seen @egoist around the JS community, and use several of their libraries (vue-cm being the one I use most, probably.) I didn't look too hard at saber at first, however, since if I was going to chose a static site generator with Vue support, the one from the Vue project was going to get my attention first.

   That wasn't the right call. 😉

   After fighting with VuePress (not being able to reliably get it installed without pinning version in my yarn.lock was the final nail in the coffin), I went back to Nuxt, since as much as it's a pain, it's working in production for me (at least for the community theater I donate some web dev time to). But Nuxt kept having weird behaviors if I upgraded it, or tried to use it in any way other than the Recommended Way. It just feels too fragile, and (oddly) poorly documented.

   Fast forward to the last week, and I've been playing with Saber and, frankly, I'm happier for it. Not that it doesn't break, or act counterintuitively, or have missing docs, or such. But I can, 90% of the time, solve my issue by looking a the code, or slapping a well placed console.log. I don't need my tools to work 100% of the time, I just need them to be consistent, reliable, and debugable (in that order). Saber fulfills that for me.

If I had one wish; it'd be that Saber used parcel, not webpack under the hood. Do I have a good technical reason? Not really, either work. But man has webpack given me a LOT of trouble, and it means I never trust it. (Not since Webpack v4, at any rate) 😉 😁

Oh, and built in search, like #138 would be phenomenal.

[FriendlyUser]

1. The simplicity of saber is quite attractive and quite useful for because I can programatically create markdown files and everything else renders consistently.

2. I heard about saber from staticgen (site that lists all the static site generators), quite familiar with vuepress, but saber is quite good as well, although I think it's the default layout on vuepress is better.

[andreasvirkus]

1. For maaany reasons (which others before me have also covered nicely ☝️ )

• Simple
• It seems like a great balance between Eleventy (trying to provide a great experience out of the box) and Vuepress (power of Vue 💚 )
• The layout, component and asset system is all very well organised (you can keep your directory structure basically flat) and thought-through
• It's one of the few static gens where I believe that I can come back in 6 or 12 months and instantly understand how things are set up and how they work. It just clicks in my mind. This if the biggest perk in my book

2. Vueland Discord

[satouriko]

I have been watching this project for years, derived from the Peco age. Then Peco got abandoned and merged into this Saber. The core features I've been looking for was:

1. A static site generator, more powerful or at least as well as Hexo
2. Modern features, like history api router out of box
3. The ability to mix customed components into Markdown documents.

Actually I was inspired at the first time I found Peco provided the feature to use Vue components in Markdown documents. I tried Peco those days but finally I gave up using it. I guess it was because of lacking some important features, e.g. the ability to change head tags (like what you can do with gatsby-plugin-react-helmet and gatsby-ssr.js now). At that time Gatsby was working on its v2 and MDX was just a prototype with a lot of discussions. So I waited and kept watching on this project for a long time. Sadly, it took too long for Peco/Saber to become stable. Although I'm already happy with Gatsby + MDX now, I wish Saber will land as soon as possible.

[egoist]

@rikakomoe those features are all available in Saber now 🤔

[xiamuguizhi]

我想体验尝试vue相关静态博客，我在谷歌一个vue相关资讯站点提到了"saber"。