Hermit-V2 - The Minimal Hugo Theme

hermit-V2 is a minimal and fast theme for Hugo, built for bloggers who want a simple and focused website. This is a maintained fork of Hermit, which iterates over the original work to have production-ready experience with bug fixes and new features.

First Impression

Check out Hermit-V2 : https://1bl4z3r.github.io/hermit-V2 This demo also acts as an documentation for the theme, utilizing its powerful features.

The source for the site is located in Staging Branch

Initial Information

Original theme for Hermit-v2 is, you gussed it, is Hermit. However, it seems Track3 isn't maintaining this anymore, which resulted in de-listing from GoHugo Themes and totally breaks in newer Hugo versions.

Goal of this project is to keep the essence of theme as-is. We will not diverge too much from the original and keep it as minimal as possible, but include all the tools for you to extend, customize and use this theme as you deem fit.

Configuration

Site Configuration is done through hugo.toml or hugo.yaml file in root directory of your Hugo Site. To aid you, there is a hugo.toml.example file located in theme folder. See this configuration for the staging branch here. See what each configuration does here.

Installation

Run this command from the root of your Hugo directory:

git clone https://github.com/1bl4z3r/hermit-V2 themes/hermit-v2

Or, if your Hugo site is already in git, you can include this repository as a git submodule. This makes it easier to update this theme. For this, you need to run:

git submodule add -b main https://github.com/1bl4z3r/hermit-V2 themes/hermit-v2

To update submodule and to have the latest version of the theme with your project, run

git submodule update --remote

Sites using hermit-V2

Sites using hermit-V2 is a user contributed list of all the blogs/pages that is using hermit-V2 in some capacity. It could be any component of the theme from landing page or a partial to full fledged use of the theme. The objective of this section is to :

• Help new and aspiring bloggers/webmasters to get inspiration from
• Create a sense of community

You can find currently listed sites from Sites-using-hermit‐V2 and you can add your site by raising an issue.

First Use Knowledge

Features Inherited from Original Theme

• A single-column layout and carefully crafted typography offers a great reading experience.
• Navigation and functions are placed in the bottom-bar which will hide when you scroll down.
• Featured image is supported. It will be displayed as a dimmed background of the page.
• Displays all of your posts on a single page, with one section per year, simple and compact.
• Extremely lightweight and load fast. No third party framework, no unnecessary code.
• All code fields feature syntax highlighting and a code-copy function
• Responsive & Retina Ready. Scales gracefully from a big screen all the way down to the smallest mobile phone. Assets in vector format ensures that it looks sharp on high-resolution screens.

Custom CSS and JS

if you feel there is a need to have your own CSS and JS to be added, there is a provision for the same. These custom files should be designed to for a page or few particular pages. E.g. If you make contact form.

To make use of custom CSS and JS, add the below section to page frontmatter. If there is any folder structure, that should be mentioned as well.

custom_css = ["custom_css/foo.css","custom_css/bar.css"]
custom_js = ["custom_js/custom-about.js"]

The files itself will reside in assets directory. Refer to Staging Branch to have a feel on how this is implemented.

Custom styles

If, for some reason, you want to apply style for the whole theme, which should be seperate from core theme styles, you can add userstyles.scss in assets/scss/. If the file exists, it will be imported during build process.

Customize theme

This theme allows to be customized. To customize, copy the respective scss file from the theme to site's assets/scss/ and edit them to your liking.

• To customize theme, Scroll to Top button and Admonition colors, copy _colors.scss
• To customize theme fonts, copy _fonts.scss

Extend functionality

Functionality can be extended via layouts.

Layouts can live in either the project’s (root) or the themes’ layout folders, any template inside the root layout folder will override theme's layout that relative to it, for example: layouts/_default/baseof.html will override themes/hermit-V2/layouts/_default/baseof.html. So, you can easily customize the theme without edit it directly, which makes updating the theme easier.

Copy files as required to site's layouts/partials/ and edit them to fit your needs.

• To add or modify SVG images used in the theme, copy svg.html
• To add or modify comment system (default is Disqus), copy comments.html
• To add or modify custom analytics(default is Google Analytics), copy analytics.html
• To inject HTML code to every page's document head or right above the closing body tag ( this makes it easy to add any HTML metadata, custom css/js, DNS-prefetch etc.), create a file at site's extra-head.html or extra-foot.html

Favicon

Use RealFaviconGenerator to generate these files, put them into your site's static folder:

• android-chrome-192x192.png
• android-chrome-512x512.png
• apple-touch-icon.png
• favicon-16x16.png
• favicon-32x32.png
• favicon.ico
• mstile-150x150.png
• safari-pinned-tab.svg
• site.webmanifest

SVG Favicons

If your favicon is in SVG format, there are two ways to implement the same in this theme.

• If you are looking for a clean directory structure, place your favicon as favicon.svg in static directory. In this mode, favicon will not be minified by Hugo
• If you want your generated site to be as light as possible, place your favicon as favicon.svg in assets/images. In this mode, favicon will be minified by Hugo

Social icons

The following icons are supported, please make sure the name field is exactly one of these:

name
email	codepen	facebook	github	gitlab
instagram	linkedin	slack	stackoverflow	telegram
twitter (Now X)	youtube	shutterstock	freepik	adobestock
dreamstime	dribbble	behance	123rf	paypal
twitch	qq	mastodon	discord	matrix
etsy	tiktok	imgur	bluesky	xmpp
medium	medium old	pixelfed	ko-fi

If that's not enough, you can see Extend functionality section.

Manage content

• Keep your regular pages in the content folder. To create a new page, run hugo new page-title.md
• Keep your blog posts in the content/posts folder. To create a new post, run hugo new posts/post-title.md

Customize CSS

1. Change predefined colors/effects - If you'd like to customize theme color or fonts, you can simply override assets/scss/_predefined.scss, by simply copy it to site's root (keep the same relative path) then edit those variables.
2. Change CSS effects limited to single page or few pages - Add following to your page FrontMatter custom_css = ["custom_css/foo.css","custom_css/bar.css"], and add the relevant SCSS files in assets directory. You may find additional help in Custom CSS and JS.
3. Change css styling sitewide - If you are unhappy with how the theme looks and feels and want to change some (or all) of it to make it truly your own, you can do so by adding assets/scss/userstyles.scss to your site's root and modify Stylesheets to your liking.

You'll need Hugo extended version, which has the ability to rebuild SCSS. You don't have to use extended version in production, but in this case it's necessary to make sure the resources folder is committed and "up to date" (by running hugo or hugo server locally using the extended version). But anyway, always use the extended version if you can.

LaTeX in Markdown

LaTeX is supported by this theme through Mathjax. Please check explaining-configs to learn more.

Translations

This theme is made specifically with translation in mind. Translations of few languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Chinese Simplified) are provided in Staging branch. However, this theme can work without Translation if your content is English only. To have translation of your language :

1. Create translation tables in the i18n directory, naming each file according to RFC 5646. E.g. i18n/<2-2 Language Code>.toml. To find your Language code, visit https://gist.github.com/msikma/8912e62ed866778ff8cd to get an idea for the code. See Staging Branch to see how this is implemented.
2. Copy English Translation key and edit to your language. Edit the section other = "<In your Language>".

Acknowledgments

• normalize.css - MIT
• animate.css - MIT
• feather - MIT
• code-copy.js - Tom Spencer
• Everyone, who has raised an issue
• Everyone, who has submitted a PR