Jane

Jane is a Hugo theme for personal blogs and content sites; it takes Markdown content and Hugo configuration as input and produces a static, search-optimized website with multiple color schemes, dark/light mode, and multilingual support. The theme has been maintained since 2018, is built by developer xianmin, and is licensed under the MIT license.

What is hugo-theme-jane?

Jane is a readable, responsive theme for the Hugo static site generator. It requires Dart Sass to transpile its Sass styling, and its output is a static site generated to the public/ directory by default. Configuration happens through the hugo.toml file at the site root, and per-post settings use front matter written in YAML, TOML, or JSON.

Key Features

• Pico CSS color schemes — Jane uses Pico CSS as its styling framework, which gives you theme color switching and a dark/light mode toggle.
• Style settings — global design variables live in /assets/sass/_settings.scss for easy personalization.
• Responsive and mobile friendly — the layout adapts to phones and small screens without extra work.
• Multilingual mode — multiple languages can run side by side through a languages section in hugo.toml, with translations collected from the i18n/ folder.
• Better pagination, TOC, and footnotes — navigation elements are tuned for long-form reading.
• Chroma syntax highlighting — code blocks use Hugo's built-in Chroma highlighter.
• Custom CSS, JS, and head — you can inject your own code into specific pages without editing the theme.
• No node_modules — the theme avoids frontend build dependencies, lowering maintenance overhead.

Who should use Jane?

• Personal bloggers — set up a clean, readable blog in a few commands and write posts in Markdown under content/post.
• Writers running multilingual sites — publish content side by side in languages such as English and Chinese using the built-in i18n translations.
• Hugo beginners — the quick start walks through installing Hugo and Dart Sass, creating a new site, and copying the example site.
• Developers who like to customize — the theme's philosophy encourages modifying it; you can edit Sass settings and use custom CSS/JS hooks.

What can you do with Jane?

• Publish a personal blog: copy the example site, adjust hugo.toml, and run hugo to generate a static site into public/.
• Run a bilingual site: set defaultContentLanguage = "zh-cn" and define a Languages.zh-cn section to mix Chinese and English content.
• Build a low-maintenance site: because there are no node_modules, you never need npm install or a frontend build step after updates.

How does Jane work?

Install Hugo and Dart Sass, then create a new site with hugo new site myBlog. Clone Jane into themes/jane, copy the example content and hugo.toml from the exampleSite folder into your site root, and run hugo server to preview at http://localhost:1313/. When you are done, run hugo to generate the static website to public/.

Pricing

Jane is free and open source under the MIT license.

FAQ

Does Jane require Node.js or npm?

No. The theme's development philosophy is explicitly "no node_modules" — it uses Hugo and Dart Sass, and it is designed to work without frontend build tools.

Can I switch between dark and light mode?

Yes. Jane uses Pico CSS for its color schemes, which provides a theme color switcher and a dark/light mode toggle.

Does Jane support multiple languages?

Yes. Define a languages section in hugo.toml and place translations in the i18n/ folder; the theme also supports defaultContentLanguage such as zh-cn.

How do I install Jane?

Either clone the repository into the themes folder with git clone https://github.com/xianmin/hugo-theme-jane.git --depth=1 themes/jane, or, if Go is installed, use it as a Hugo module.

What license is Jane under?

MIT, as specified in the LICENSE file in the repository.