Fieldnotes

Fieldnotes is a Hugo theme for a personal site that combines blog posts and notes with trip maps, photo and video galleries, MathJax maths and syntax-highlighted code. It renders Markdown into a static site with no server, database or separate build step of its own.

What is Fieldnotes?

Fieldnotes is a Hugo theme for personal websites, distributed as a Hugo module (github.com/maxfettinger/fieldnotes). It takes Markdown content as input and outputs a static site generated by Hugo, requiring Hugo 0.158 or newer in the extended edition. The theme ships with an exampleSite/ folder that runs the live demo, and a docs/ folder holding the documentation site built with Vitrine.

What makes Fieldnotes stand out?

• Six presets — fieldnotes, minimal, editorial, cinematic, brutalist and terminal layouts, each with its own way of drawing the site; any preset pairs with any of fourteen colour schemes.
• Trip maps — route maps rendered on MapTiler's topographic base map from a GeoJSON route file.
• Photo and video galleries — built from a folder of media and opened in a swipeable viewer via dialog-lightbox.
• Home page layout — a photo, a greeting, profile links and one flexible card for anything you choose.
• Maths and code — MathJax typesetting configured through Goldmark passthrough delimiters, plus code blocks coloured to match the active scheme with a copy button.
• Extensibility without forking — custom presets, colour schemes, CSS and hooks can be added on top of the theme.
• Search-engine metadata — JSON-LD and Open Graph data that match what visitors actually see on the page.
• Accessibility — contrast levels that pass WCAG AA.

Who is it for?

• Writers and bloggers who want posts and short notes on a personal site that stays fast and static.
• Travellers and photographers documenting trips with a route map plus photo and video galleries generated straight from a folder.
• Technical writers publishing maths-heavy or code-heavy notes with MathJax and highlighted, copyable code blocks.
• Tinkerers who want to restyle a theme through custom presets and schemes rather than maintaining a fork.

How does Fieldnotes work?

Create a project with hugo new project my-site, initialise a Hugo module, then add the theme path to hugo.toml under module.imports and fetch it with hugo mod get. The theme's required Markdown settings — noClasses = false for highlighting, unwrapped standalone images, and passthrough delimiters for block and inline maths — go in the same config file. Running hugo server then serves the site locally; the theme can alternatively be added as a Git submodule.

FAQ

Is Fieldnotes free?

Yes. Fieldnotes is released under the MIT licence, and the bundled icon set (Feather) and the dialog-lightbox photo viewer are also MIT-licensed. Map tiles come from MapTiler, which is a separate third-party service.

Which Hugo version does Fieldnotes need?

Fieldnotes requires Hugo 0.158 or newer, and specifically the extended edition. The theme is installed as a Hugo module, so the hugo mod commands are used to add and update it.

Can I change the look without forking the theme?

Yes. The theme supports your own presets, colour schemes, CSS and hooks. Six presets and fourteen colour schemes ship built in, and any preset can be combined with any scheme.