Switching to Minimal Mistakes

Today I’ve switched the blog’s theme from Hydeout to Minimal Mistakes. I did so for several reasons:

• I didn’t like the color scheme that Hydeout used for syntax highlighting, and I didn’t want to fiddle with this myself.
• I wanted a theme that provides more flexibility and had active maintenance, big community and good documentation.
• I liked the visuals of Minimal Mistakes. And its name. I know I’ve made plenty of big mistakes so far, so the prospect of minimal mistakes is appealing to me.

I considered changing the blog’s theme for a while now, but I couldn’t find any theme that I really liked. In general Jekyll themes are a hot mess - most of them are buggy, abandonware or some combination of both. I think that the only theme that I’ve never had any issues with was Jekyll’s default theme - “minima”. It’s not fancy, but it gets the job done and doesn’t create any problems.

Minimal Mistakes was the only theme that got my attention during search for a good Jekyll theme, but for some reason I was never really in the mood to sit down and do the actual migration work. Until today. What triggered me to go forward was a small Hydeout bug into which I ran a few days ago. I guess I just needed a little push.

The migration process was super simple and it basically consisted of the following steps:

• Read the Quick Start Guide and copy and edit a few config files that it refers to.
• Replace the uses of the post and page layouts with the single layout (for me this simply meant editing the metadata of a bunch of posts of pages).
• Push to GitHub Pages.

The documentation is so good, that I got everything working for the first try. I think then entire process took me about an hour.

There are a lot of features of Minimal Mistakes that I haven’t leveraged yet, but I’m quite happy with the initial result and the simplicity of the migration process. I plan to gradually adopt more of the theme and I might write a follow-up article, if I feel that something deserves additional attention.