Ezhil

Ezhil is a clean and minimal Hugo theme for building a personal blog and portfolio website, shipping with dark mode, social links, and Disqus comments out of the box.

What is Ezhil?

Ezhil is a Hugo theme designed for personal blogs and portfolios. It takes a Hugo site with Markdown content and generates a static website with a responsive, clean layout. The theme is developed by GitHub user vividvilla and is freely available on GitHub. It includes built-in support for tags, Google Analytics, syntax highlighting, Twitter cards, Open Graph tags, and RSS feeds.

Key Features

• Dark mode — Automatically detects the user's operating system preference, with an optional manual override to force dark mode or auto mode.
• Responsive design — Adapts to mobile, tablet, and desktop screen sizes without additional configuration.
• Tag support — Enables content organization through Hugo taxonomies, with a configurable tag taxonomy.
• Social media links — Displays icons in the header using Feather Icons, with names and URLs defined in the config.
• Google Analytics — Integrates your tracking code via the googleAnalytics configuration option.
• Syntax highlighting — Supports Pygments with pygmentsstyle, pygmentscodefences, and pygmentscodefencesguesssyntax settings.
• SEO and sharing — Generates Twitter Cards and Open Graph tags for social media sharing.
• Disqus comments — Adds comments to posts, with per-page control to disable them using the disqus: false front matter field.
• Custom CSS and JS — Lets you load additional stylesheets and scripts via customCSS, customDarkCSS, and customJS parameters.
• Content types — Supports page type for static pages that are excluded from recent posts and can be selectively excluded from Disqus.

Who is it for?

• Personal bloggers — Publish posts with tags and comments to build a minimal reading experience.
• Developers — Create a portfolio to showcase projects and write technical articles, with syntax highlighting for code.
• Designers and writers — Use the clean layout and dark mode to present content without visual distractions.

What can you do with Ezhil?

• Start a personal blog — Write Markdown posts, assign tags, and publish a fast static site with RSS feeds.
• Build a portfolio — Create an About page using type: page and list your work in recent posts.
• Share content on social media — Rely on Twitter Cards and Open Graph tags to control how links appear when shared.
• Engage readers — Enable Disqus comments on posts, or disable them on selected pages or content types.

How does Ezhil work?

Ezhil works as a standard Hugo theme. To use it, clone the repository into your Hugo site's themes directory and set theme = "ezhil" in your site configuration. You then configure parameters for social links, analytics, navigation, and appearance. Content is written as Markdown files with front matter that can specify type, title, date, and comment preferences.

FAQ

Does Ezhil support dark mode?

Yes. Ezhil automatically detects the operating system's color scheme and switches between light and dark modes. You can also force dark mode by setting mode = "dark" in the configuration.

How do I install Ezhil?

Download the theme from GitHub and copy it into your Hugo site's themes/ezhil directory. Alternatively, run git clone https://github.com/vividvilla/ezhil.git inside the themes folder, then set theme = "ezhil" in your config.

How do I add social media links?

Define [[params.social]] entries in your config file, each with a name, an icon name from Feather Icons, and a URL. The icons appear in the site header.

Can I disable comments on a specific page?

Yes. Set disqus: false in the front matter of that page. You can also disable comments for entire content types using the disableDisqusTypes site parameter.

Does Ezhil include syntax highlighting?

Yes. Ezhil supports Pygments-based syntax highlighting. Enable code fences with pygmentscodefences = true and optionally guess the language with pygmentscodefencesguesssyntax.