Show HN: nunjucks, a better templating system for javascript (jinja2 inspired)

    Missing features that will be implemented (in order of priority):

    Autoescaping

For someone considering handlebars, here is what I have found really constraining, note that most of them are by design:

- No builtin equality check between two variables. So, you can do:

   `{{#if my_boolean}}`, but cannot do 

   `{{#if my_variable == 2 }}`

   You have two options here: 

   - Resort to implementing an ifequal helper (and other trivial helpers like gt, lt etc.)
   - Prepare everything before handing it to the template, so before passing the json to the template, add another field like, equal_to_two to check for equality with 2.

Say you are iterating over answers of a question, so you do:

{{#each answers }}

{{ text }} - {{ user }}

{{/each}}

At some point, you will want to add some information in the parent scope, so you do this:

{{#each answers }}

{{ answer.text }} - {{ answer.user }} -- in response to {{../user }}

{{/each}}

Now, you may want to register this snippet as a partial:

{{ answer.text }} - {{ answer.user }} -- in response to {{../user }}

So that you can do:

{{#each answers }} {{> answer_partial }} {{/each}}

But answer_partial cannot access the parent scope (question item); so you resort to another custom helper "include".

- Lack of keyword and delimiter compatibility with Django/Jinja2; so you need to replace each of your {% if %}'s to {{if}} and so on.

- It is hard to tell what the current context is referring to at times, so, it is helpful to use an additional debug helper (again not builtin) that just logs the current context. Block helpers change the context, except when they don't.

The only reservation I have with nunjucks is that it faces the danger that it might be abandoned like other efforts; other than that, it seems it will address all the painpoints I am experiencing with handlebars, but speaking with jlongster on twitter, he seems determined to keep working on it.

Let me quickly state something about Jade: I think it's great for those whose philosophy is "as little typing as possible." For me, my goal is simplicity, not minimal typing. That's why I don't like Jade. I can take a Jinja template, show it to somebody who only knows HTML, and they can figure it out rather quickly. Jade, not so much.

If not, where do you think I should advertise it?

Jinja won.

Now, let's get the best from all and unify it in a universal templating system, so all languages can build libraries to parse and render the same templates, no matter the language.

We all win.

Perhaps my templating needs are trivial, but isn't that what a parial is? Mustache lets you include any template within another template, thereby "inheriting" from the parent.

Nice that you can precompile templates too. Can’t wait to roll this into my brunch template.