Themes

Themes are packages of templates, CSS, and JavaScript used by the Hugo engine to produce a Static Site. There are many popular themes to choose from highlighted on Hugo Themes.

Below are my notes and observations on the few with which I am familiar.

I no longer use any of them. brisberg.dev has no theme — its layouts live in the site repo. The notes below are kept because the comparisons are still useful if I ever reach for a theme again, and because the way this ended is instructive: I accumulated three theme submodules, used one, and left the config describing a different one. See Hugo for the reasoning.

Minimal

Minimal is a simple, clean interface with a reasonable amount of features.

nikitavoloboev uses it for his home site, which is how I found it; I used it for brisberg.dev for several years before dropping themes entirely.

Book

Book is a minimalist theme specialized for documentation websites.

Book has many of the features ideal for a Knowledge Wiki:

• Flexible, tree-based navigation menu
• Simple and effective shortcodes
• Table of Contents for each page
• Git Integration for calculating last edit time and one-click editing.
• Integrated Search using flexsearch
• Light/Dark Theme

I used this theme for the knowledge wiki when it was a separate site at wiki.brisberg.dev. Its content now lives under /wiki/ and is rendered by this site’s own layouts. Book’s tree navigation and built-in search are the two features I actually miss.

Zdoc

Zdoc (Demo) is an opinionated wiki framework for creating documentation websites. It has since been delisted from the Hugo Themes directory, though the theme and its demo are still up.

Zdoc differs from Book in the following ways:

• Navigation Menu only displays the current tree level
• Similar shortcodes
• Language Dropdown
• Integrated Search using Fuse.js
• Light/Dark Theme toggle

Search experience is better because it includes match previews. Search Index is pre-built at Hugo build time so is fast on the client.

A light/dark theme toggle gives better user control, and saves preference to Local Storage.

However, I found it a bit more cumbersome and visually noisier than I intended. At the time it didn’t sit well next to the Minimal theme brisberg.dev was using.

My previous attempt to use this theme is preserved in the zDoc branch of the (now archived) wiki.brisberg.dev repo for posterity.