Hugo theme notes

For my notes, I started with gatsby-theme-code-notes, powered by Gatsby. Gatsby is a very popular static site generator, but I really don't want that much javascript on a site as simple as some text notes. But, at the time, the code-notes theme was fantastic and supported everything I needed, so it was a necessary evil.

As time went on, doing upgrades to Gatsby, the underlying plugins and the theme became a real pain, and I'd mostly given up on the site. Not to mention that earlier this year, the theme was archived, as the maintainer switched their notes to Eleventy, in a way which doesn't easily allow extracting the theme to be reused.

I finally gave in and decided to write my own - again.

hugo-theme-notes is a theme for Hugo aimed for storing notes, heavily inspired by gatsby-theme-code-notes.

#Why Hugo?

Hugo is a great static site generator, but it really has its issues - namely the template engine. Go's templates are fine for some things, but horrible for others (a rant I went in to when I switched this website from Hugo).

Originally, I wanted to use Zola, as a chance to play around with it in preparation for another personal project. However, Zola just isn't as popular, which limits the theme's reach, and had a really hard time with anything external.

The killer feature which sent me back to Hugo was modules. With some hacks, I could force Hugo to install some dependencies for me, without needing to rely on git submodules or vendoring in libraries (both of which aren't universal). In this case, I used bulma as a CSS framework, and Hugo will automatically download it at build time, without the user even noticing.

For that, and for the lightning fast build and ease of use, are the reasons I stuck with Hugo. If you're already using Hugo, grab the theme and get started publishing your notes.

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