Chirpy

Chirpy has emerged as one of the most beloved Jekyll themes of the last few years, and for good reason. Where many themes offer either good looks or good features, Chirpy delivers both. Its clean, modern design prioritises readability — comfortable line lengths, generous whitespace, and a typographic hierarchy that guides your reader through even the longest technical articles.

The dark mode implementation is among the best in the Jekyll ecosystem: it respects the operating system preference by default, remembers the user’s manual override, and transitions smoothly between modes without a flash of unstyled content.

For technical bloggers, Chirpy’s automatic table of contents is a standout feature — headings in your Markdown are parsed and rendered into a sticky, collapsible sidebar on desktop. Readers always know where they are in a long post, and can jump to any section instantly. Combine this with the reading time estimate and the copy-to-clipboard code blocks, and you have a theme purpose-built for developers who write.

Chirpy ships as a GitHub Actions-powered starter template, meaning you can fork, configure your _config.yml, and have a live site on GitHub Pages in under ten minutes.

Who is it for? Technical bloggers, developers writing tutorials, and anyone who publishes long-form content and wants their readers to have a genuinely great experience.

Installation

# Fork the chirpy-starter template:
# https://github.com/cotes2020/chirpy-starter
# Then update _config.yml with your details

# Or add as remote theme:
remote_theme: cotes2020/jekyll-theme-chirpy