Minimal is a personal portfolio & blog theme for Hugo.

Minimal has been originally created by Calin Tataru. I was really fond of what he concieved, so I forked his project and made some additions of my own:

• added time to read,
• minimised the JS footprint,
• switched to SASS,
• dark mode[to be implemented].

You can install the theme either as a clone or submodule. The latter is highly recommended since it's a more modular approach and hence provides better management.

In order to install it as a submodule, from the root directory of your Hugo web site:

$ git submodule add https://gitlab.cansurmeli.com/can/minimal.git themes/minimal
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

Now you can get updates to Minimal in the future by updating the submodule:

$ git submodule update --remote themes/minimal

As the submodule is updated, it's recommended to separately commit that change by:

$ git add *
$ git commit -m "Submodule update."

After the installation, take a look at the exampleSite folder inside themes/minimal.

To get started, copy the config.toml file inside exampleSite to the root of your Hugo web site:

$ cp themes/minimal/exampleSite/config.toml .

Now edit this file and add your own information. Note that some fields can be omitted.

I recommend you use the theme's archetypes so now delete your site's archetypes.

$ rm archetypes/*

The original minimal theme manages some aspects of the design via the configuration file. However, I saw that it relates to a messy infrastructure. Also with the integration of SASS, it's more modular.

Hence if you want to modify the appearance of the theme, you'll have to deal with either assets/sass or layouts/partials/ folders mostly.

The theme uses Google Fonts to load it's font. To change the font, replace the content of the file on the location assets/sass/dependencies/_google-fonts.css with your Google Fonts'.

The original minimal theme goes with the option of configuring the font from config.toml file but with this approach(SASS infrastructure with Hugo's built-in asset bundling & minification) CSS content is much better managed.

The theme uses Hugo's built-in syntax highlighting; therefore no messy JS dependencies.

It's enabled by default, and you can customise it via the variables in config.toml under the [params] section.