I Created Two Ultra-Minimalistic Jekyll Themes

Because I wanted to flex my minimalism muscle, I created two new Jekyll themes:

“Nix” for those, who use Jekyll as a blogging engine (or GitHub Pages) and want to have a very minimalistic, but functional theme (also classless).

“Nixer” for those, who use Jekyll as a blogging engine (or GitHub Pages) and want to have an ultra-minimalistic, barely functional theme (also classless). Compared to “Nix”, it doesn’t disclose anything on the website about authors or blog names. There, the content truly takes center stage as there is no stage at all.

Nix

Nixer

I created “Nixer”, after I was finished with “Nix”, to see, how far you can go to remove most functionality from a website, until it wouldn’t make sense anymore.

Both themes are optimized for fast build speeds, therefore doesn’t have either SCSS, includes, or any dependencies.

Their purpose is to be minimalistic (“Nix”) or hard-core minimalistic (“Nixer”), single-author themes. Because there is no menu, pages can be manually linked in the body of `index.md`. But “Nixer” users won’t be doing that, because the whole point of this theme is to not display anything more than just the content of posts and a list of posts.

They implement as little changes as possible from the default browser settings. They only do it to improve legibility.

“Nix” is meant for people, who like the default browser style. “Nixer”, however, for people however, who are aware that nobody is using RSS feeds anymore. Either because they don’t know what they are or how to use them, or they replaced Google Reader with social media. So all visitors are coming from search engines – let’s be honest, Google – and won’t read other posts, unless they are linked in the post itself.

But hey – both have a dark mode and demo pages.

Nix and Nixer?

“Nix” is the grammatically incorrect form of the German “nichts”, which in English means “nothing”. It’s colloquially used to stress the nothingness. “Nixer” is the even more grammatically incorrect comparative of that, which colloquially may or may not being used at all.

Or, if you will, it could be UNIX without the “U”, because of “Nix’” somewhat archaic properties, which are even more archaic for “Nixer”.