Hello Friend NG-HZ is a Hugo theme for personal blogs and content sites that bundles dark/light theming, multiple search backends, comment systems, and analytics trackers out of the box.
What is Hello Friend NG-HZ?
Hello Friend NG-HZ is an open-source Hugo theme forked from the hello-friend-ng project and inspired by hello-friend and hermit. It takes standard Hugo content and configuration and renders a fully responsive blog with a default dark theme, code highlighting, and optional search and author pages. The theme is maintained by Rohit Goswami and released under the MIT License.
Key Features
- Dark/light theming — Default dark mode that can be toggled; external links are purple, internal links are blue, and alert classes support info, success, warning, and error.
- Font choices — Two stacks: the default pairs Bookerly with Geomanist and Cascadia; an alternative uses Bookerly with Inter UI and Hack.
- Search backends — Supports Stork (requires a generated index file) and Fuse.js (client-side fuzzy search but adds jQuery weight).
- Comment systems — Native hooks for Utterances, Graphcomments, CommentBox, and Disqus.
- Analytics trackers — Includes Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, GoatCounter, and Clicky.
- Multi-author support — Author-specific pages and listings built on the author taxonomy.
- Code highlighting — Uses PrismJS with a long list of supported languages, plus pure-JavaScript copy-to-clipboard buttons on code blocks.
- Taxonomy clouds — Categories and tags render as word-clouds.
Who is it for?
Hello Friend NG-HZ suits bloggers and content teams who want a self-hosted Hugo site with built-in integrations. Individual writers get a clean, responsive layout with multiple font options; multi-author publications can assign per-author pages; developers who like Hermit-style minimalism get the hello-friend look with extra search and analytics features.
What can you do with Hello Friend NG-HZ?
- Personal bloggers: Set up a dark-mode blog by copying the example config and running hugo server, then customize the logo, social icons, and taxonomy display.
- Multi-author teams: Enable the author taxonomy and create author-specific pages to list posts by contributor.
- Technical writers: Publish code-heavy posts with PrismJS highlighting, line numbers, and copy buttons.
- Privacy-conscious site owners: Use GoatCounter for lightweight analytics and Utterances for GitHub-based comments to avoid third-party trackers.
How does Hello Friend NG-HZ work?
Install the theme by cloning the repository into the themes directory or adding it as a git submodule, copy the example config, then run the Hugo server with the theme flag to view the site locally at localhost:1313.
Pros and cons
- Pros: Free and MIT-licensed; no required build step beyond Hugo and optional sass; supports multiple authors, search, comments, and analytics.
- Cons: There is a known Hugo bug where an empty taxonomy part can break the main page rendering; the workaround is to comment it out or define tag and category explicitly.
Pricing
The theme is free and open source under the MIT License; no paid tiers are mentioned.
Alternatives
- hello-friend — the original theme this project is inspired by.
- hermit — a minimal Hugo theme that also inspired this project.
- hello-friend-ng — the predecessor project this theme extends.
FAQ
Does Hello Friend NG-HZ support dark mode?
Yes, dark mode is the default theme and can be toggled to light. The configuration setting 'defaultTheme' accepts 'dark' or 'light'.
What search backends are available?
Two backends are available: Stork (which requires generating an index file with the stork build command) and Fuse.js (a client-side fuzzy search that adds some jQuery weight).
Can I use Disqus comments?
Yes, Disqus is one of four supported comment systems, along with Utterances, Graphcomments, and CommentBox.
Is the theme free?
Yes, the theme is released under the MIT License and is free to use and modify.
