Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by legends2k | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

legends2k

I'd recommend Hugo for

- Single binary distribution. No dependencies or time wasted setting up things. Just extract and use.

- Dozens of themes to pick from [0]

- Straight forward customization of theme's styling

- Tinkering Go templates are fairly easy

- Accepts markdown and Org-mode as input formats

- Tags, categories, multilingual, search, etc.

- Support for comments [1]

I've been using it for my site [2] for more two years now. It has embedded JavaScript/CSS WebGL demos, code blocks with syntax highlighting (again no dependency on Pygments, etc. and has preset themes), images, footnotes, math equations using MathJax, etc. Tools enough to write a well-formatted book.

[0]: https://themes.gohugo.io/

[1]: Disqus, Utterances, Commento, etc.

[2]: https://legends2k.github.io

View on HN

I've used Hugo for a while and was drawn to its single binary, quick builds, and nice template features. However, after a few years I've decided that it's not for me.

While the Hugo developers are very responsive and do a good job maintaining the project, they don't generally respect their users (be they theme or site developers) time. Every few versions I find that my sites are broken because the developers changed something on me, sometimes in ways that just silently change the behavior of the site (as opposed to a build error, which would be annoying but which is more discoverable).

The documentation is also very difficult for me to learn from. Despite being extensive, it's extremely hard to learn how to do anything and I find that it frequently makes assumptions that you already are an expert theme or site developer. I wish I had a better grasp on what makes their documentation so hard to use despite the fact that there's so much of it, but I find that what I'm reading is almost never what I need to actually understand what's going on. This might just be me though.

I find exactly the same thing. Hugo is perfect for me, it does exactly what I want it to do and has all the features I’ve wanted in a static site builder, but despite having used it for a couple of years, I still cannot find what I’m looking for in the documentation.

I am also a Hugo user - and I love it - but also find the documentation pretty bad. Not only hard to find stuff I need but also pretty basic sometimes.

As a software developer I found Hugo hard to learn. Lots of keywords, strange templating syntax, but YMMV.

I still use it, but it’s not exactly beginner friendly.

I'd to understand a couple of terms here and there, sure, but if you're willing to read [0] documentation Hugo has clear explanations.

[0]: A key requirement of being a developer

I've read their documentation many times, and never found any of it clear. Quite the contrary, I've found the docs very hard to navigate and learn from. Maybe this is just me though? They always seem to have a lot of documentation, but all of which just assumes you understand what other terms mean, or how complicated things behave without actually pointing you to where you could learn such things.

To further this, to get a "good looking" Hugo site going I find myself going through shared hugo projects and pulling various features together in my project - a process that requires a fair amount of trial and error and plenty of frustrations. I haven't tried Jekyll, and I still think Hugo is a great project, but it didn't leave me with a fully satisfied experience such that my next static site will try out something else. I'm also a full-time go developer fwiw.

I’ve been using Hugo for years and I still can’t find what I’m looking for in the documentation.

I made two fairly advanced SaaS / product sites using Hugo (https://vamp.io and https://checklyhq.com) and would actually advice to not use Hugo for any new initiatives.

- the templating syntax is just very confusing.

- the documentation was terrible, is still terrible and probably will remain terrible.

- the split between index and list pages is still a big pain. Many things work on one but not the other.

- upgrades break your site almost always.

- error messages are arcane

This might sound bitter, but I was a fan in the beginning. Development seems to have gone off track somewhere, probably when the original maintainer left.

Probably Vuepress for simple docs and blog site is the simplest one I’ve found, but I’m pretty comfortable with Vue.

I don't recommend Hugo for:

- Confusing architecture

- Steep learning curve

I recommend Jekyll more than anything else. It is simple, beautiful and straight forward. Easy.

I understand that you feel so, but I found Hugo to be logical and straight forward.

Jekyll, OTOH, needed me to install umpteen things. Note: C++ developer here, never had to use Ruby directly for anything. I write my articles on-the-fly on different laptops, during flight, etc. So having `git` and `hugo` alone in the terminal and Emacs is good enough for me. Hugo also runs a local server which updates Firefox on every save.

I'm also a C++ dev an I'm envious of how clean your site design is. Do you have any insight you can share on how you approached the frontend design? I find myself constantly fiddling with the CSS and I feel like I could fiddle around with it forever and still not be happy.

> I find myself constantly fiddling with the CSS and I feel like I could fiddle around with it forever and still not be happy.

I'm afraid I'm guilty of this too; countless hours of yak shaving [0] the stylesheet :( However, one thing I consciously avoid: not being happy. Every session, at close, I make peace with the existing styles and tell the perfectionist in me that it'll never be perfect but will eventually get close. For that session I'll make possible changes and write the rest on my mind in TODO. My original site was just a copy of Ghostwriter theme[1] and small incremental updates eventually led to what you saw.

Thanks for the compliment :)

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving

[1]: https://github.com/jbub/ghostwriter

I agree on not recommending Hugo, I spent way too much time on it without being able to figure it out. I now use Lektor, it's simple and very flexible.

+1 for Lektor, great project. I've been using it for my site for the last 2 years or so and it's been much less hassle than Hugo.

Another +1 for Lektor. I use both Lektor and Hugo to run a few static sites and have come to dread updating the Hugo ones, while the Lektor model just seems to fit better with the way I think.

I didn't know Hugo supports Org-mode and that's an interesting feature! Does Jekyll support that too? or Maybe other static site builders?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com