from Hacker News

HonKit: A Fork of GitBook

by matsuu on 6/27/20, 4:09 AM with 36 comments

• by JimDabell on 6/27/20, 7:08 AM

  For those who weren’t aware, this is the reason behind the fork:

  > As the efforts of the GitBook team are focused on the GitBook.com platform, the CLI is no longer under active development.

  — https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook#%EF%B8%8F-deprecation-w...

• by prepend on 6/27/20, 11:42 AM

  I’m so happy this project is picking up the fork. Gitbook was a great project, but they really moved everything to their SaaS with artificial barriers to just using the software.

  It was cool that they left cli around, but as abandonware.

  I thought it strange that it was such a non open source behavior to only support their monthly service even though one of the main benefits I see in static site generators is the flexibility of hosting and cost.

  I feel bad for them as it must be a hard business to compete with Bookdown and other projects.

• by asicsp on 6/27/20, 6:40 AM

  See also mdBook [0] for another alternative to Gitbook

  [0] https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook

• by creato on 6/27/20, 7:26 AM

  I just spent a few minutes reading the readme, and I still can't figure out why this tool (or GitBook) is directly connected to git. OK, a bunch of markdown and json files in folders form a book. How is this connected to git?

  I totally get storing the markdown files/folders in git, but surely any other version control system would be fine too?

• by glofish on 6/27/20, 12:57 PM

  I wrote a sizeable book with gitbook and I found it to have substantial design flaws. Once the book had a few hundred files the rendering became exceedingly slow.

  It became clear to me that, internally some sort of scaling problem is present in the code that manifests itself abruptly once the book hits a certain size.

  Rendering to html would take 2-3 minutes (attempting to reload the latest version of a single page also triggers a complete re-rendering of all pages, obviously making the process non-feasible).

  I migrated to bookdown that renders the entire book in about 10 seconds (and reloads single pages quickly).

  I wonder if honkit fixed those internal design errors that made gitbook unusuable for me.

• by axegon_ on 6/27/20, 7:36 AM

  Never used gitbook so I have the following question: in terms of content creation, how does it stack up compared to sphinx?

• by young_unixer on 6/27/20, 6:28 AM

  Tangential: How is GitBook/GitBook.com not trademark infringement of git?

• by artsyca on 6/27/20, 9:03 AM

  Is this semantic markup for writing or is it like headers and paragraphs? I'm pretty much stuck in the LyX mindset when it comes to treating documents as code.

• by suyash on 6/27/20, 7:28 AM

  This is much needed as GitBook moved away from Book publishing and abandoned open source spirit.

• by type0 on 6/27/20, 2:10 PM

  So nice to see that gitbook-cli abandoned project is finally picked up again. How would the integration with Calibre work, since it awaits major changes in upcoming versions?

• by phonon on 6/27/20, 6:30 AM

  Anyone have a comparison between this and Docusaurus v2?

• by jarvuschris on 6/27/20, 2:51 PM

  I hope the team is thinking of dusting of GitBook Editor too

• by nchudleigh on 6/27/20, 11:34 AM

  desperately needed, going to check this out. we tried this gitbook enterprise product.. definitely headed in the wrong direction for our needs.

• by manojlds on 6/27/20, 6:09 AM

  What's the name supposed to mean?

• by TLightful on 6/27/20, 12:47 PM

  Racist.