Perhaps I am obtuse, but I am not trying to BE obtuse…
Can you unpack the above quote? To YOU what problem does YAML solve with regards to front matter? Why is front matter magical, different, or special, that it needs its own language?
Again, I think I am missing something basic…
But without Frontmatter in your posts you cannot have a functioning Hugo site.
Hugo supports both TOML and YAML.
HackMd only YAML. Meaning that if you use this in your posts HackMd will recognize tags and titles and give you a better UX.
Perhaps you should read the documentation to clear things up. I cannot put it more clearly than I already did.
Thanks for your blunt reply! Really, thanks so much. 
I upped my caffeine dosage and read that page again. It makes more sense now but I still have a way to go…
I think my understanding was hindered by the terminology. YAML, being “Yet Another Markup Language”. It is that, but as you pointed out, it is a SUPERSET of basic md, not a replacement with different characters for Bold, Headers, etc. They are not separate and distinct… I do not need to “Choose one”. By choosing YAML, I get BOTH.
Hope this helps future readers! I was reading YAML literally and not seeing the forest because all those damn trees were in the way…
You should think of YAML as data oriented not as a markup language.
The meaning of the acronym has changed to YAML ain’t a markup language.
Glad you figured it out.
And JSON …
Yesterday I had some success hooking up a Hugo site with Pancake.io https://www.pancake.io
It supports YAML. Editing and saving Hugo markdown content is feasible. It’s main drawback is that preview works the old fashioned way i.e. one has to click a button and then the preview opens in a new tab.
Also regarding HackMD even though it is an excellent editor importing a content folder with lots of md files is next to impossible. Also another annoying feature is that when one creates a new file it’s public and editable by anyone by default. It’s pretty boring having to set privacy for each piece of content one makes in HackMD…
So I guess that this topic is not really solved after all… and I removed [Solved] from the title…
I just released a small update to Lipi after a long time.
Its not actively developed yes, But I do plan on fixing reported bugs and adding requested features that are feasible.
I could not figure out or reproduce your error but then I realized what may be the problem.
Lipi only supports opening Old Blogs that use TOML for all configs and frontmatter.
Other blogs will crash and burn. I do not plan to support anything other than TOML.
But I will have to add a warning for this.
Next time please open an issue on github.
I use TOML. And I am on Ubuntu.
Someone else who is on Windows reported that Lipi works.
Lipi is developed and tested on my Kubuntu Laptop.
I basically made it for class and now regularly use it for maintaining some lightweight blog sites.
If you are interested to resolve the issue, please open a github issue with the exception text copy pasted and details.
Thanks for the reply.
Thank you but I cannot re-test Lipi right now. I may do so in the future if time permits and I will let you know through Github.
HackMd looks like it has a LOT more Markdown formatting that is unique to it than what we can use within Hugo… is that because it’s using a different rendering engine (Hugo uses Blackfriday)?
Probably… I haven’t really tested all of HackMD’s markdown features as I need basic features that already exist in Blackfriday.
It’s not a desktop app per se, but you can run Pendulum on your machine and open the interface up with a browser. It supports GFM syntax and can edit anything from Leanpub books to Hugo posts. Image previews also work, and the preview updates as you type. I’d love it if you could give it a whirl and add some feedback 
The app is written in Go, and binaries are provided in GH releases for Windows, OSX and Linux.
Thanks! I’ll check it out.
And the winner is Pendulum! After 3 months I finally checked it out and it is what I was looking for!
So a big thanks to @titpetric
Very simple little editor with no dependencies.
It has a split screen layout (input on the left and live preview on the right.
Works offline (unlike HackMD).
Has Docker Image.
And it can load a folder full of content.
Simple and neat. I’m very pleased.
PS
Can someone please mark this thread as solved? It seems that l can no longer edit the title on my own. Thanks.
I saw that there are people clicking on the above link to the Pendulum Github repo, so here is a word of caution.
There is a closed (as of today) Github issue regarding image previews not loading within Pendulum.
The maintainer has included as part of the solution a Hugo shortcode that loads an img file from the same folder as the content file that uses it (pretty much like the upcoming Hugo Bundles).
But as I’ve found out the Pendulum asset_img shortcode does not use valid Hugo syntax and if one uses it as suggested, the img preview may work in Pendulum but when the Hugo site is generated the shortcode will break.
See my comment at Pendulum’s repo for more details https://github.com/titpetric/pendulum/issues/2#issuecomment-347190283
Of course there are other ways to load image previews in Pendulum and have a functioning Hugo site at the same time. If anyone is interested I may elaborate further.
EDIT
Turns out that Pendulum’s included asset_img shortcode is for Hexo and not Hugo. See here.
I’d like to promote Quiqr https://quiqr.org. It’s my personal side project. Quiqr is an electron app, includes a Hugo server and includes a git client for pushing and pulling changes. You can import hugo themes and there is a Quiqr template gallery. Quiqr is an actively supported and orignated as a fork of Hokus. https://www.hokuscms.com/
You could try Frontmatter for VSCode
I was searching everywhere for Quiqr; I couldn’t remember the name and my bookmarks/history/sessions weren’t helping! Thank you for making it! Suggestion: Homepage title would be more useful if it was something like Quicr: Open-Source CMS, rather than Home - Quiqr, as I and Google would probably have found it sooner lol