HUGO PURE

Keep it simple, but not simpler

Hugo Pure is a minimal Hugo theme for personal blogs, forked from and built on top of hugo-xmin by Yihui Xie. It keeps xmin's "extremely minimal" spirit — roughly 160 lines of HTML templates and CSS in total — while adding a few opinionated touches for a cleaner, more blog-friendly reading experience.

What's different from hugo-xmin?

Homepage is intro-only. The home page renders just the content of _index.md instead of dumping every post. Your blog index lives at /post/.
Blog index grouped by year. The /post/ listing groups posts under year headings (2026, 2025, …), so archives are easier to scan. Other sections (e.g. /note/) keep the original flat, date-sorted list.
"Blogs" nav entry. The example site config adds a Blogs → /post/ menu item so the blog index is one click away.
Math & images out of the box. KaTeX rendering and image auto-centering are baked into the theme via foot_custom.html (no longer something you have to copy from the example site). Supports $...$ , $$...$$, $...$, and \[...\].
Cleaner footer placeholder. params.footer ships with generic [Name]/example placeholders and a {Year} token that auto-fills the current year.
locale-based <html lang>. The page language is driven by the top-level locale config, via .Site.Language.Locale.
Web fonts out of the box. head_custom.html loads Fira Sans (Latin, sans), Noto Serif SC / 思源宋体 (CJK, serif), and Fira Code (code) from jsDelivr's @fontsource, and static/css/fonts.css applies them. Only the 400 and 700 weights are loaded to keep the payload small; see Fonts for details.

Everything else - the ~50-line stylesheet and the partial-based layout - is unchanged from xmin; head_custom.html and foot_custom.html remain available as override hooks (see Customization).

Line count

Still tiny:

find . -not -path '*/exampleSite/*' \( -name '*.html' -o -name '*.css' \) | xargs wc -l

      19 ./layouts/post/list.html
       9 ./layouts/_partials/footer.html
       7 ./layouts/_partials/foot_custom.html
      20 ./layouts/_partials/header.html
       7 ./layouts/_partials/head_custom.html
       5 ./layouts/404.html
      20 ./layouts/list.html
      12 ./layouts/single.html
      13 ./layouts/terms.html
       8 ./static/css/fonts.css
      51 ./static/css/style.css
     171 total

Features

Single-column, centered, readable layout (~800px)
Top nav menu, configurable via menu.main
Post listing grouped by year (/post/)
Category and tag taxonomy pages (/categories/, /tags/)
Author and date metadata on posts (via author / date front matter)
KaTeX math rendering ( $...$ , $$...$$, $...$, \[...\])
Automatic image centering
Web fonts via CDN: Fira Sans (Latin) + Noto Serif SC (CJK serif) + Fira Code (code)
Configurable footer with {Year} placeholder
RSS feed and a 404 page

Requirements

Hugo (extended edition not required)

Installation

cd your-site
git clone https://github.com/Case3y/hugo-pure.git themes/hugo-pure

Then set the theme in your site config (hugo.yaml):

theme: "hugo-pure"

Configuration

A minimal hugo.yaml:

baseurl: "https://example.org/"
locale: "en-us"
title: "My Site"
theme: "hugo-pure"

permalinks:
  note: "/note/:year/:month/:day/:slug/"
  post: "/post/:year/:month/:day/:slug/"

menu:
  main:
    - name: Home
      url: ""
      weight: 1
    - name: Blogs
      url: "post/"
      weight: 2
    - name: About
      url: "about/"
      weight: 3
    - name: Categories
      url: "categories/"
      weight: 4
    - name: Tags
      url: "tags/"
      weight: 5
    - name: Subscribe
      url: "index.xml"

params:
  description: "A minimal Hugo blog."
  footer: "&copy; [Name](https://example.org) 2026 -- {Year} | [GitHub](https://github.com/example)"

markup:
  highlight:
    codeFences: false
  goldmark:
    renderer:
      unsafe: true
    extensions:
      passthrough:
        enable: true
        delimiters:
          block:
          - - \[
            - \]
          - - $$
            - $$
          inline:
          - - \(
            - \)

Key settings

Setting	What it does
`locale`	Sets `<html lang="...">` via `.Site.Language.Locale`. Use `zh-cn`, `en-us`, etc.
`menu.main`	Top navigation entries. `url` is relative; `weight` sets order.
`params.footer`	Footer HTML/Markdown. `{Year}` is replaced with the current year.
`permalinks`	URL patterns for the `post` and `note` sections.
`markup.highlight.codeFences`	`false` = no built-in syntax highlighting (xmin default). Set `true` to enable.
`markup.goldmark.extensions.passthrough`	Lets you write math with `$...$` / `\[...\]` directly in Markdown.
`markup.goldmark.renderer.unsafe`	`true` allows raw HTML in Markdown.

Tip — bilingual blogs. If you publish posts in multiple languages, you can set the language per post by adding lang: zh-cn (or en-us) to its front matter, then override layouts/_partials/header.html in your site with <html lang="{{ .Page.Params.lang | default .Site.Language.Locale }}">. The site-wide locale then acts as the default for the homepage and listing pages.

Math

Inline: $E = mc^2$ or $E = mc^2$. Display:

$$
\int_0^\infty e^{-x^2}\, dx = \frac{\sqrt{\pi}}{2}
$$

Rendering is done client-side by KaTeX, loaded from jsDelivr in layouts/_partials/foot_custom.html.

Fonts

Web fonts are loaded from jsDelivr (@fontsource) in layouts/_partials/head_custom.html and applied in static/css/fonts.css:

Latin body text - Fira Sans (sans-serif)
CJK body text - Noto Serif SC / 思源宋体 (serif)
Code - Fira Code (monospace)

Only the 400 (regular) and 700 (bold) weights are loaded, to keep the payload small. Because Fira Sans has no CJK glyphs, Chinese characters automatically fall through the font-family stack to Noto Serif SC, so you get sans Latin

serif CJK by default:

body {
  font-family: "Fira Sans", "Noto Serif SC", serif;
}

To use different fonts or weights, edit head_custom.html (the <link>s) and fonts.css (the stacks), or override them in your site's layouts/ and static/ directories.

Customization

Two extension hooks let you inject code without touching the theme:

layouts/_partials/head_custom.html - added inside <head>. Ships the web-font <link>s by default (see Fonts); add your own CSS/analytics here or override it in your site's layouts/.
layouts/_partials/foot_custom.html — added at the end of <footer> (currently holds the KaTeX / image-centering scripts; override it in your project's layouts/ directory to change).

To override any template, copy it from themes/hugo-pure/layouts/ into your site's layouts/ directory and edit — Hugo's lookup gives your site's version priority.

Acknowledgements

Based on hugo-xmin by Yihui Xie. The minimal template structure, stylesheet, and overall philosophy are all inherited from it.

License

MIT, inherited from hugo-xmin. See LICENSE.md.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
.github		.github
archetypes		archetypes
exampleSite		exampleSite
images		images
layouts		layouts
static/css		static/css
.gitignore		.gitignore
LICENSE.md		LICENSE.md
README.md		README.md
hugo-xmin.Rproj		hugo-xmin.Rproj
theme.toml		theme.toml

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HUGO PURE

Keep it simple, but not simpler

What's different from hugo-xmin?

Line count

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Installation

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Math

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Customization

Acknowledgements

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HUGO PURE

Keep it simple, but not simpler

What's different from hugo-xmin?

Line count

Features

Requirements

Installation

Configuration

Key settings

Math

Fonts

Customization

Acknowledgements

License

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