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About seven months ago, I rewrote this blog using Emacs Orgmode.
Emacs is an incredibly powerful Lisp machine. When paired with Orgmode, you have a powerful publishing platform. It feels limitless but also intentionally agnostic. Because of how deep and vast the reach of Orgmode’s publishing features are, it doesn’t always feel like the most direct way to generate a website. It doesn’t always feel simple.
Hugo, unlike Orgmode, is more opinionated and purpose-built. Your web views and templates are HTML files with Go’s template system. Your metadata is abstracted into highly flexible TOML files and Markdown headers. Once you get the hang of things, it’s very easy to hack on and reason about.
It’s also worth noting that in my personal battle of “Emacs vs. Neovim,” a move back to Hugo is to some extent a side effect of me breaking away from Emacs once again. However, this is a topic for another blog post :)
My reacclimating to Hugo was much, much faster than my learning how to publish
with Orgmode to begin with. It only took me a handful of minutes to refresh my
memory and convert the articles to Markdown. For the theme, I used hugo new theme to create a blank slate. I then repurposed my old CSS file and
tweaked the bare-bones templates into something I enjoyed looking at. The
inspiration for the new theme is a mashup of Markdown syntax and my favorite
Neovim theme: material.nvim
If you’d like, you can find (and steal) my theme here: https://codeberg.org/trevdev/material-md-dark