Hugo Themes ranked by GitHub Stars | Hacker News Reader

Hugo Themes ranked by GitHub Stars

hugoranked.com

162 pointssydney634 comments

A pedantic comment. I think it should be saying "5000 GitHub stars" instead of "5000 Git stars". Similarly, "GitHub Link" instead of "Git Link". Git ≠ GitHub.

Makes sense for the stars, but I don't think it matters so much for the link. People are generally happy to accept a link to a web based repository browser, github or otherwise, as a git/repo/whatever link. Especially when the clone URL is usually only 2 clicks away.

The official https://themes.gohugo.io/ appears to already sort using GitHub stars descending by default, isn't limited to just the first 10 themes, actually links to the repo, is a lot more informative at face value...and doesn't have a stupid Load More button that isn't actually a button.

The big thing to notice here: all of the top themes are minimalist. Limited colors, simple layout, just nice spacing and typography.

I've spent a lot of time looking for good, professional-looking minimalist themes and the pickings have been slim, regardless of platform. Too many theme designers load up their designs with unnecessary elements.

Note to designers: less is more.

I would recommend adding Doks to the list - https://getdoks.org/ Doks is an opensource documentation and blog theme. Looks amazing.

Hugo is fun and very extensible. I love that it is a single-file binary that I can download and use without bothering about dependencies.

When I moved away from Jekyll, I built a Hugo theme for my blog as my first for-profit hobby project - https://define.run/lucid-theme/

It is a pity that so many projects use Github metrics in some form or other, and thus help promote the dominance of this platform and the FOMO barrier to use some other forge.

What would you use instead here?

Mine was more a general observation. The GH stars metric is attractive to be used for ranking, because so many projects are on Github. But sites like this also work to keep it this way forever i.e. "I must be on GH for my theme to become popular".

Maybe Hugo Themes [0] or Netlify might offer a usage metric on their site. Here are two Hugo themes whose code is on Codeberg (a Gitea forge dedicated to FOSS projects) that still have a presence on Github, probably due to FOMO:

- https://codeberg.org/Lednerb/bilberry-hugo-theme

- https://codeberg.org/cinux/hugo-theme-techdoc

Didn't look on (self-hosted or primary) Gitlab, but can imagine there'd be a whole bunch of Hugo themes there too.

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

Loved Bilberry. Unfortunately I'm not ready to say goodbye to a sidebar on desktop

For some reason I'm unable to load more when I click on the button. Tried both FF and Edge.

Same on safari mobile.

There is not more to load. It's not even a button, just text looking like a button. Can't we still use semantic HTML anymore?

You don't get HTML. Neither do I. A couple years back there was a well-received "semantic HTML" submission here. I was in the small minority wondering how come `<div class="button">` is better semantics than `<button>`.

This page is a pretty convincing argument for why <button> is the right element: https://www.buttoncheatsheet.com/

It's not quite right though. You need

    <button type=button

if you don't want it to have submit semantics (including submitting the containing form if you happen to have it in one).

And this thread right here is why we can't have truly semantic HTML, and why the thing most people tout as "semantic HTML" today... isn't.

I've come to think the error in semantic HTML is that humans think there's a difference between "button" and "ceqnej"... but there isn't. Something has to actually define the difference. Computers don't care.

Where can I get this definition and apply it to my program?

There isn't one.

The browser knows what a <button> is, but it knows a lot of other things. <button> isn't particularly special.

I still have to explain it to any program I may write, and it's no skin off my nose to explain it what a "button" is, or a <div class="button">, or a <div class="ceqnej">. If I don't speak English that's what button looks like anyhow.

What I can get for my program is a specification of HTML and a compliant parser. But that provides extremely weak "semantics".

"Semantic HTML" is a cognitive illusion brought about by looking at 62 75 74 74 6F 6E and conflating your human read of those bytes with real meaning.

(There is value to using nice-looking HTML... but the value is for humans, and has more to do with principles of software engineering and data organization and virtually nothing to do with "semantics".)

XML would be truly semantic

This is actually my site, the feedback here is great and I will action a number of the things here!

- Load more button did work but the web scraping script to grab all the data had failed after retrieving only ~10 sites. So there was no more to load, this is already fixed.

- Will change references to "Github stars" etc. to just "Git"

- Will add info about what Hugo actually is above the fold!

- Will remove the stupid size increase on hover

- Academic appears twice, this is actually because the Academic team appears to have 2 different repos and have submitted it to Hugo twice... annoying, but technically correct?

Overall I don't love the design if I am being honest.

The academic-theme seems to have a duplicate entry at position 1 and 4 in the list. The academic-theme card at position 1 links to another theme: wowchery-hugo-theme, which has the correct/ corresponding github stars.

I have used Hugo for an internal docs site for a few years until I saw a gem that is https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/

Now, even my personal website runs off of mkdocs + material. Such a pleasant software.

The hugo theme I use on my blog gets these warnings from Google. Things such as font is too small for mobile. Can anyone recommend a theme from this list that meets all the checkboxes for a blog and does not have any issues raised by Google?

https://www.jamstackthemes.dev has a similar list of Hugo themes but also has about 800 open source themes for all the other ssgs like Jekyll, Gatsby, Next etc

I was expecting to see 'Coder' theme in Top-10 and I am not disappointed.

Why there's is two theme named "academic" with same description and screenshot? Can anyone explain to me. I been wondering quite a while

Would be great to have a Gitbook-like theme for Hugo.

Have you looked at Docsy? https://www.docsy.dev/

If this is your website, I recommend adding something above the fold of the home page explaining what Hugo is.

Also an "X" button to go back to the list.

also 'esc' or 'back'

I have no idea what Hugo is and was frustrated by this too.

Hugo is a static site generator.

I guess that if you are looking for themes for it, that is when this site would be relevant for you, then you would already know what it is.

These all look pretty ugly to me. Is nobody designing some nice ones for Hugo?

I make some nice open source and premium themes for Hugo at https://www.zerostatic.io

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