Vortisil is a fast, minimal Hugo theme for blogging, built around a restrained design with light/dark themes, full-text search, and MathJax-rendered mathematical formulas.
What is Vortisil?
Vortisil is an open-source Hugo theme from GitHub user khitezza, distributed under the GNU GPL v3.0 license. It generates a static blog from Markdown content using the Hugo static site generator, with support for homepage, blog posts, an about page, archives, and search. The theme requires Hugo extended (version 0.116.0 or later) and Git to install as a git submodule.
Key Features
- Light/Dark theme — A switchable color scheme implemented with CSS custom properties; both themes' primary colors can be overridden in a custom.scss file.
- All articles search — The theme ships a search interface; the homepage output includes both HTML and JSON to power client-side lookup.
- MathJax.js formula rendering — Enable per-post math by setting a
math flag in front matter; the theme loads MathJax to display LaTeX expressions.
- Giscus Comments — Integrates Giscus, the GitHub Discussions comment widget, with configuration for repo, repo ID, category, and language in the site config.
- Responsive design — The layout adapts to small screens and mobile devices.
- Works showcase — A data file lets you list project cards on the homepage, each with name, URL, and description.
Who is it for?
- Independent bloggers — They get a minimal, fast static site with no JavaScript framework overhead.
- Academic and technical writers — They can publish formulas with MathJax and keep a clean reading layout.
- Developers with Git/Hugo experience — They can extend the theme by editing SCSS, customizing data/l10n.toml strings, and updating the theme via git submodule merge.
What can you do with Vortisil?
- Publish a personal blog: Use Hugo's content scaffolding to create posts with a predefined front matter template covering title, date, author, license, cover image, and math toggles.
- Deploy to GitHub Pages: The repo includes a ready-made GitHub Actions workflow that installs Hugo 0.143.1, builds the site, and deploys to Pages; add a CNAME file for a custom domain.
- Customize branding: Replace the logo, hero image, and favicons at the documented asset paths, and adjust the primary color per theme in custom.scss.
How does Vortisil work?
Install Git and Hugo extended, then add the theme as a git submodule with a single command. Update it later with a git submodule merge. Create posts using Hugo's new content command, configure hugo.toml for comments, menus, and metadata, then build and deploy the static site.
