Hi everyone, I want to introduce windancer – a toolkit I’m developing to parse and render org‑mode documents, built entirely in Rust.
As an org-mode user who is not fluent in Emacs Lisp, I have found that customising the built-in export or integrating org-mode with other tools can be cumbersome. At the same time, static site generators for org-mode remain relatively rare – most existing tools convert org-mode to Markdown first, which often results in imperfect output. That’s why I started windancer: to parse org-mode directly and generate static sites in a reliable, idiomatic way. What it does: - A pure Rust org-mode parser following the Org Syntax specification. - A static site generator (SSG) that turns a directory of .org files into a complete HTML website. - Optional anonymous discussion support via tinydis (a lightweight commenting backend). - Single binary – easy to install and run on Linux and Windows (macOS support planned). Quick example With a structure like this: examples/blog/ ├── config.toml ├── note/ │ ├── editor/ │ │ ├── emacs.org │ │ └── vi.org │ ├── life/ │ │ ├── life.org │ │ ├── music.org │ │ ├── running.org │ │ └── todo.org │ └── note.org ├── static/ └── templates/ Running `windancer -i examples/blog/note/ -o /tmp/blog.site`, produces a complete site with corresponding HTML files, automatically handling index pages for folders that contain an org file with the same name as the parent directory. Installation Pre-built binaries for Linux and Windows are available on the GitHub releases page. If you have Rust and Cargo installed, you can also install it directly from source: cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/cnglen/windancer Current status and roadmap The parser already supports a large subset of org-mode syntax, and the static site generator is functional. Future plans include: - org-roam-like knowledge management - Full-text search by keyword - Better documentation and theming - Possibly PDF book/slide export You can find more details in the repository: https://github.com/cnglen/windancer I believe windancer could be useful for people who want to use org-mode as their primary writing format but need a fast, standalone tool to publish content. I’d love to hear feedback, bug reports, or feature suggestions – especially from experienced org-mode users. If you find the project interesting, any form of support is welcome. There’s a Ko-fi page for those who wish to sponsor further development. Thank you for your time, and thanks to the org-mode community for creating such an amazing system. Best regards cnglen
