Evershibui

Evershibui is a minimal Hugo blog theme that combines Everforest color palettes with Shibui-inspired simplicity, giving a quiet, restrained reading experience. It runs on the Hugo static site generator and outputs a responsive blog with toggleable dark and light modes.

What is Evershibui?

Evershibui is a Hugo blog theme built around two ideas: the Everforest color palette and Shibui, a Japanese aesthetic of understated simplicity. It takes standard Hugo content and configuration as input and produces a responsive blog site with light and dark color schemes, code blocks highlighted through Chroma, a sidebar outline of post headings, and KaTeX math typesetting. The theme is distributed as a Git repository (9zxu/evershibui) that you add as a submodule. The page does not name an individual author beyond the GitHub account.

Key Features

• Responsive layout — adapts to desktop, tablet, and mobile screens without separate mobile themes.
• Toggleable dark/light mode — both modes are built on the Everforest color palette rather than generic grays.
• Chroma syntax highlighting — code blocks in posts are highlighted with Hugo's built-in Chroma highlighter.
• Tag-based taxonomy — posts are organized and browsed by tags, with taxonomy and term templates included.
• KaTeX math typesetting — inline and display math are supported in posts.
• Sidebar outline — a heading outline in the sidebar for quick navigation through long posts.
• GitHub profile card — a GitHub card partial is shown on the homepage.
• Callout blockquotes — a render hook supports [!NOTE]-style callouts in blockquotes.

Who is it for?

• Hugo bloggers who want a minimal reading-focused theme instead of a feature-heavy one.
• Developers writing technical posts, who need Chroma code highlighting, KaTeX math, and a sidebar heading outline.
• Design-conscious site owners who want to remap colors through semantic CSS tokens without editing layout files.

How does Evershibui work?

Add the theme as a Git submodule into themes/evershibui, then set theme = 'evershibui' in your site config (for example hugo.toml). The theme requires Hugo 0.146.0 or later. You can override any template by copying the matching file into your site's own layouts/ directory at the same relative path; Hugo prefers the site version over the theme's.

How do you customize the colors?

Color customization is split into two separate layers. assets/css/_palette.css is the only file allowed to hold hex codes and defines the Shibui palette (dark "Sumi" and light "Washi") as --ef-* CSS variables. assets/css/_tokens.css maps semantic names such as --color-bg and --color-text to those variables with no hex codes. main.css controls which palette is active through its @import order. To change how colors look, edit the hex values in _palette.css; to change which color a token uses, remap it in _tokens.css. A previous Everforest palette lives in _palette-everforest.css, unused but kept for reference or rollback; swapping the import in main.css switches to it. Layout and component CSS only reference semantic tokens, never --ef-* variables or hex values.

What layout files does the theme ship?

Layouts live under layouts/. baseof.html is the base template. Content-type templates cover home.html, page.html, section.html, taxonomy.html, term.html, and 404.html. Page chrome comes from _partials/header.html, footer.html, sidebar.html, and menu.html. Listing partials are post-list.html, term-list.html, and terms.html. The <head> assets are included through head.html, head/css.html, and head/js.html, and github-card.html renders the homepage profile card. _markup/render-blockquote.html handles callout blockquotes.