Minima

Minima is the theme that ships with every new Jekyll installation — and while that might make it sound like a default, throw-away choice, the reality is quite different. The Jekyll core team actively maintains Minima, ensuring it is always compatible with the latest Jekyll version and GitHub Pages environment. Many of the most popular Jekyll sites on the internet run on Minima, often heavily customised but using it as their foundation.

Version 3.0 represents a significant maturation of the theme. Six skins — auto, classic, dark, solarized, solarized-dark, and midnight — are bundled in, giving you a dramatic range of visual identities to choose from without touching a line of CSS. The auto skin respects the operating system preference, making your site automatically appear in dark mode for users who prefer it.

What makes Minima genuinely valuable — beyond its compatibility guarantees — is how well it teaches you Jekyll. The codebase is deliberately simple and well-commented. Every layout, every include, every Sass variable is named clearly and does exactly what you expect. When you are ready to customise, you override only what you need, and the rest continues to work. This approach has made Minima the starting point for hundreds of custom themes built by developers learning the platform.

Who is it for? Developers learning Jekyll, anyone who needs a simple blog deployed today, and theme builders who want a solid, officially supported foundation to build on.