Jekyll TeXt Theme: A Configurable Jekyll Theme for Docs, Blogs and Project Sites

What Jekyll TeXt Theme Is For

Most Jekyll themes pick one job. A blog theme gives you post lists and tags. A documentation theme gives you a sidebar and nested pages. TeXt Theme tries to cover both, plus personal sites, team sites and project landing pages, from a single codebase. The README describes it as "a super customizable Jekyll theme for personal site, team site, blog, project, documentation, etc." and the visual reference is iOS 11: large titles, round buttons, cards.

The audience is therefore people who do not want to maintain two sites. A small team writing release notes and reference documentation can keep both on one Jekyll install, sharing navigation, authors and skins. The cost of that decision is size. The repository carries _layouts, _includes, _sass, _data, docs, test, tools and docker directories, plus a Dockerfile.dev and a set of docker-compose files. That is a lot of surface area for a theme, and it is the first thing to weigh if you only need a blog.

One detail worth noting before you start: the theme is distributed as a Ruby gem, jekyll-text-theme, and the gemspec sits at the repository root. The package.json version is 2.2.6, matching the most recent release listed in the repository, v2.2.6 from 2020-02-02. The repository's last push was on 2026-06-08, so commits continue even though no newer tag appears in the release list. Treat the tag history as the stable line and the branch as the moving one.

How TeXt Theme Assembles a Page

TeXt Theme is a conventional Jekyll theme in structure, which is good news: there is no build system to learn beyond Jekyll itself. Pages and posts carry front matter; Jekyll renders them through files in _layouts, which pull fragments from _includes and styles from _sass. Site-wide values live in _config.yml, and structured data such as navigation and authors lives under _data.

What makes the theme feel larger than a stock Jekyll install is the set of switches in _config.yml. Skins, highlight themes, internationalization, search, table of contents, authors, comments and analytics are all configuration rather than code you write. The README lists six built-in skins (default, dark, forest, ocean, chocolate, orange) and five highlight themes built on Tomorrow (tomorrow, tomorrow-night, tomorrow-night-eighties, tomorrow-night-blue, tomorrow-night-bright). It also lists optional integrations: Disqus, Gitalk and Valine for comments, LeanCloud for pageviews, Google Analytics, AddToAny and AddThis for sharing, and jekyll-feed for RSS.

Content features are layered on top. The README documents additional styles (alert, tag, image, icon, button, grid) and extensions (audio, video, slides, demos), plus Markdown enhancements for MathJax, mermaid and chartjs. In practice this means a documentation page can carry a diagram and a formula without you adding a plugin, provided you enable the relevant option. The trade-off is that every enabled feature is another external script on the page, and the README does not document the performance impact of turning them all on.

Installing TeXt Theme and Rendering Your First Page

The README points to the Quick Start page in the theme's own documentation site for installation, and the repository ships a Gemfile, a gemspec and a Dockerfile.dev. The gem is named jekyll-text-theme. A typical local workflow, matching the scripts declared in package.json, starts with installing dependencies and then serving the site.

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve -H 0.0.0.0

bundle install resolves the Gemfile, which includes the theme gem. The serve command starts Jekyll's development server bound to all interfaces, which is what the repository's serve script does. Open the address Jekyll prints in the terminal and you should see the site rendered with the default skin.

If you would rather not install Ruby locally, the repository provides Docker Compose files under docker/. The development variants are exposed as npm scripts, so from the repository root:

npm run docker-dev:dev

That runs docker-compose -f ./docker/docker-compose.dev.yml up, per package.json. There is also docker-dev:demo-dev and a production-oriented docker-prod:serve, which sets JEKYLL_ENV=production before bringing the compose file up. The build script for a production build without Docker is:

npm run build

which the package.json defines as cross-env JEKYLL_ENV=production bundle exec jekyll build. Note the cross-env dependency: the scripts assume npm is available even for a Ruby project. If you only want Jekyll, call bundle exec jekyll build directly and skip the Node tooling.

Where TeXt Theme Gets in the Way

The most concrete limitation is version drift. The newest release in the repository's release list is v2.2.6, tagged on 2020-02-02. The repository's last push was on 2026-06-08, so work continues on the branch, but anyone installing from the published gem or from a tag is installing code from 2020. The README's update guide covers moving from 1.x to 2.x; it does not describe a path from 2.2.6 to the current branch. If you need a fix that landed after that tag, you are reading commits, not release notes.

The second limitation is scope. TeXt Theme bundles comments, pageviews, analytics, sharing, search, math and diagram rendering. Each of those is a decision you inherit. A team that wants a content-security-policy-friendly site with no third-party scripts will spend time removing features rather than adding them. The README lists the integrations but does not document how to fully disable each one or what remains in the generated HTML when you do.

Third, the documentation lives on a separate site (kitian616.github.io/jekyll-TeXt-theme/docs), not in the repository README, which is mostly a feature list and a link index. That is normal for a theme this size, but it means grepping the repository is often faster than reading the docs when you need to know which _config.yml key controls a given behaviour. The README does not document rollback or downgrade steps for the theme itself.

TeXt Theme Compared with Minimal Jekyll Themes

The related search results for this project include Minimal Mistakes-style alternatives and smaller themes such as Hyde, So Simple, Contrast and Forty. The difference in approach is worth stating plainly. Hyde and Forty are small: a handful of layouts and a stylesheet, with few configuration keys. You read them in an afternoon and change them by editing files. TeXt Theme is the opposite bet. You configure it, and the customization happens through _config.yml keys, _data files and skin variables rather than by rewriting layouts.

That bet pays off when your requirements match the feature list. Documentation with a table of contents, a blog with authors and tags, math in posts, mermaid diagrams in a spec: all of that exists in TeXt Theme without plugin hunting. It costs you when your requirements fall outside the list, because you are now modifying a large theme, and your changes have to survive the next time you pull from upstream.

A documentation-focused theme is the other natural comparison. If your site is only docs, a theme built solely around a sidebar and nested navigation will have less you need to switch off. TeXt Theme's advantage is that the blog and the docs share one navigation, one author list and one skin. If you do not need both, you are paying for the second one anyway.

Licence and Long-Term Upgrade Cost

TeXt Theme is MIT licensed, and the LICENSE file sits at the repository root. MIT is permissive: you can use, modify and redistribute the theme, including commercially, provided the copyright notice and permission notice are retained. The repository does not state a separate licence for the documentation content or the screenshots, so if you plan to reuse images or docs text rather than the theme code, check the individual files. This is a description of the licence text, not legal advice.

Upgrade cost is the more practical concern. Because the theme ships as a gem, the clean path is to bump the gem version in your Gemfile and rebuild. That works while releases keep coming. With the newest listed release at v2.2.6 from 2020-02-02 and continued commits on master, there is a real chance you will want a fix that is not in any tag, which pushes you toward tracking the branch. Tracking a branch means your _config.yml and any layout overrides get re-tested on every pull.

The mitigation is to keep your customizations in the places Jekyll expects: _config.yml, _data and your own content, with as few edits to _layouts and _includes as you can manage. The repository's own docs directory is built with the theme, which gives you a working reference configuration to compare against when something breaks after an update.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt TeXt Theme if you are building a Jekyll site that mixes long-form posts with documentation and you want skins, layouts, search, math and diagrams already wired up rather than assembled from plugins. Do not adopt it if you want a small theme you can read end to end, or if you need to run on the newest Jekyll and Ruby versions and cannot test the build yourself. Before committing, verify that your Ruby and Bundler versions resolve the Gemfile, that a local build passes, and that the features you plan to enable (comments, pageview, analytics) have the account credentials the documentation says they need.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. kitian616/jekyll-TeXt-theme on GitHub
2. License: MIT
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases