No Style, Please! is a minimalist, nearly no-CSS Hugo theme designed for content-focused blogs, ported from riggraz/no-style-please by hanwenguo. It prioritizes speed and readability by shipping less than 3kb of CSS, while still offering features like dark mode, MathJax support, and RSS feeds. The theme is a static site generator for Hugo and outputs a fast, responsive blog.
What is No Style, Please!?
No Style, Please! is a Hugo theme that keeps the total CSS size under 3 kilobytes, making it one of the lightest options for Hugo users. It is a port of the Jekyll-based no-style-please theme and runs on Hugo, taking Markdown content and rendering it as a static website. The theme comes with light, dark, and auto appearance modes, and its dark mode implementation uses the CSS invert() function on the whole page. It also supports the HTML details tag and includes a responsive layout.
Key Features
- Under 3kb CSS — The entire styling of the theme is packed into less than 3 kilobytes, resulting in extremely fast loading times.
- Light, dark, auto modes — Users can select appearance in config.toml, with dark mode achieved by inverting colors via CSS; images are excluded from inversion by default but can be included with an "ioda" class.
- Responsive and content-first — Typography is optimized for readability, and the layout adapts to mobile and desktop screens.
- RSS feed — The theme uses Hugo's embedded RSS template, so a feed is generated automatically.
- MathJax support — Mathematical formulas can be rendered by including MathJax, useful for technical blogs.
- Nested menus — The main menu is configured through a data/menu.toml file and supports nested entries, post lists, and show-more links.
- Table of contents — Add toc: true in a post's front matter to generate a table of contents; an optional tocBorder improves visibility.
- Group posts by date — Setting params.theme_config.isListGroupByDate to true in config.toml groups the post list by date in descending order.
Who is it for?
No Style, Please! is for bloggers and writers who want a clean, minimal site without the overhead of a heavy theme. It also suits developers who prefer a simple codebase for Hugo, where customizing the menu and config is done through TOML files. The theme is a good foundation for personal blogs, portfolios, and documentation pages that focus on text content.
What can you do with it?
- Personal bloggers: Publish Markdown posts and get a clean, fast, RSS-enabled site automatically.
- Developers: Customize the theme's config.toml and data/menu.toml to define site structure, menus, and post lists without writing custom CSS.
- Technical writers: Use MathJax to include mathematical notation in your posts, and group posts by date for easier browsing.
How does it work?
To install, clone or add the theme as a submodule to themes/nostyleplease, then set theme = 'nostyleplease' in your config.toml. The theme's config.toml contains commented fields for customization, and your site's config.toml overrides it completely. Example pages are included with draft: true in their frontmatter, so use --buildDrafts to preview them. Customization happens through config.toml and the data/menu.toml menu definition file.
