Minimal

Minimal is a Hugo-powered personal blog theme that generates a clean, content-focused blog from Markdown content and a single configuration file.

What is Minimal?

Minimal is a personal blog theme built for the Hugo static site generator. It takes Markdown content files and a config.toml file as input and produces a static, self-hostable blog with customizable accent colors, background color, borders, fonts, and optional syntax highlighting. The theme is developed by calintat and distributed as a GitHub repository that can be added to any Hugo site as a submodule.

Key Features

• Customizable accent color — Set the accent color via the accent field in config.toml, with a recommendation to use a dark accent on a light background.
• Background color control — Adjust the site's background color using the backgroundColor parameter.
• Optional colored borders — Enable 5px top and bottom page borders by setting showBorder to true.
• Google Fonts integration — Choose any font from Google Fonts by setting the font field to the font's name.
• Syntax highlighting via highlight.js — Turn on syntax highlighting with the highlight parameter, choose a style with highlightStyle, and load additional languages with highlightLanguages.
• Easy installation — Install as a git submodule with three commands, or clone directly; updates are pulled with git submodule update --remote.
• Example configuration — The theme ships with an exampleSite folder containing a ready-to-copy config.toml.

Who is it for?

• Personal bloggers — Writers who want a minimal, unobtrusive design for their Hugo blog with no visual clutter.
• Hugo developers — Developers who want a lightweight starting point to customize and extend a static blog theme.
• Technical writers — Authors who need built-in code syntax highlighting to share programming snippets.

What can you do with Minimal?

• Set up a blog quickly — Copy the example config.toml to your Hugo site root and start writing Markdown posts without extra configuration.
• Reskin the look — Change accent colors, background color, borders, and font entirely through config.toml parameters.
• Publish code-heavy posts — Enable highlight.js and load common or custom languages to display code with syntax highlighting.

How does Minimal work?

First, install the theme as a git submodule (or clone) into the themes/minimal directory of your Hugo site. Then copy the config.toml from the exampleSite folder into your site root, edit it to add your site information, and optionally adjust theme parameters like accent, showBorder, font, and highlight. Hugo then builds your static site using the theme's templates, with content from your Markdown files.

FAQ

Is Minimal free?

Yes, Minimal is an open-source Hugo theme distributed on GitHub under a repository (calintat/minimal), and it can be used for personal or commercial projects without charge.

What does Minimal do?

Minimal is a Hugo theme that transforms Markdown content and a config.toml file into a static personal blog. It provides a clean layout with configurable accent colors, background color, borders, Google Fonts, and highlight.js syntax highlighting.

How do I install Minimal?

Install Minimal by adding it as a git submodule to your Hugo site with git submodule add https://github.com/calintat/minimal.git themes/minimal, then run git submodule init and git submodule update. Copy the example config from themes/minimal/exampleSite/config.toml to your site root and edit it.

Does Minimal support custom fonts?

Yes, Minimal loads fonts from Google Fonts. Set the font parameter in config.toml to the name of any font available on Google Fonts, such as Raleway.

Can I enable syntax highlighting in Minimal?

Syntax highlighting is disabled by default. Set highlight to true in config.toml, optionally select a highlightStyle such as "solarized-dark", and use highlightLanguages to load languages beyond the default "common" set.