moonwalk - a fast and minimalistic blog theme with clean dark mode

TRY THE DEMO

Features

  • Light & dark mode with theme switcher (respects prefers-reduced-motion)
  • Typeset in Geist (body & headings) and Geist Mono (code)
  • Agent-friendly out of the box - per-page .md siblings, /llms.txt, and /llms-full.txt
  • Built-in client-side search over post titles, tags, and excerpts
  • Hover-preview cards on internal post links (opt-in)
  • Footnote tooltips - read footnotes inline without scrolling (opt-in)
  • Smooth page transitions via the View Transitions API in supporting browsers
  • Drop-cap on the first paragraph of a post (opt-in via dropcap: true)
  • Tag cloud with frequency-weighted sizing on the tag archive
  • Personality 404 with random-post link
  • Vertical list, horizontal list, card list
  • Landing page with navbar, footer, portfolio
  • Fast (very minimal CSS) - 100/100 on performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, please see Lighthouse Report for more details
  • Responsive and mobile friendly
  • SEO optimized with auto-generated sitemap
  • RSS feed (uses Jekyll Feed)
  • GitHub Markdown Alerts (NOTE, TIP, IMPORTANT, WARNING, CAUTION)
  • Polished <details> collapsibles for asides and "long version" expansions
  • Tag archive page with clickable tags
  • Light and dark mode syntax highlighting with language label on each code block
  • Accessible - ARIA labels, keyboard friendly
  • Reading progress bar (opt-in)
  • Back-to-top button (opt-in)
  • Previous/next post navigation (opt-in)
  • Table of contents via toc: true front matter (opt-in)
  • Code block copy button with language label (opt-in)
  • Easy to extend
  • Fully compatible with GitHub Pages (see GitHub Pages installation)
  • Auto-generated share images for social media (using Soopr)
  • Share & like buttons (using Soopr)

Lighthouse

Quick Installation

  1. Fork this repository.
  2. cd moonwalk
  3. bin/bootstrap
  4. [Optional] Sign up on Soopr, and add your publish_token in _config.yml file.

If you are installing Moonwalk on Windows, please note that you might have to use Ruby 3.0.x instead of Ruby 3.1.x - you can see Windows specific installation instructions here

Starting Server

bin/start - development server will start at http://127.0.0.1:4000

Deployment

Moonwalk can be easily deployed on all the cloud providers (AWS etc.), and on static website hosting services like Netlify & Vercel. You can also use this button to do one click deploy

Deploy with Netlify

If you want to use Moonwalk as a gem or use Github Pages, please see this page

Customizing

You can edit _config.yml file to customize your blog. You can change things such as the name of the blog, the author, the appearance of the theme (light, dark or auto), how dates are formatted, etc. Customizable fields should be straightforward to understand. Still, _config.yml contains some comments to help you understand what each field does.

For further customization (e.g. layout, CSS) see the official Jekyll's documentation on customizing gem-based themes.

Customize the menu

In order to add/edit/delete entries in the home page, you can copy the home.yml file inside _data folder. Through that file you can define the structure of the menu and add data for navbar, footer, portfolio or simply remove all of that and use simple blog layout. Take a look at the default configuration to get an idea of how it works and read on for a more comprehensive explanation.

The home.yml file accepts the following fields:

  1. Vertical list
    • entries define a new unordered list that will contain menu entries
    • each entry is marked by a - at the beginning of the line
    • each entry has the following attributes:
    • title, which defines the text to render for that menu entry
    • url, which can either be a URL or false. If it is false, the entry will be rendered as plain text; otherwise the entry will be rendered as a link pointing to the specified URL. Note that the URL can either be relative or absolute.
    • post_list, which can be true or false. If it is true, the entry will have all posts in the site as subentries. This is used to render your post list.
    • entries, yes, you can have entries inside entries. In this way you can create nested sublists!
  2. Card list - cards are used to showcase portfolio projects. Please see project_entries in _data/home.yml file
    • each entry is marked by a - at the beginning of the line
    • each entry has the following attributes:
    • title defines the header of the card
    • desc is the body of the card
    • url is a relative or absolute link which this card can point to.
    • highlight in case you want to highlight something, keep the text short though
  3. Horizontal list - moonwalk uses horizontal lists to create navbar and footer. Please see navbar_entries and footer_entries in data/home.yml file
    • each entry is marked by a - at the beginning of the line
    • each entry has the following attributes:
    • title defines the header of the card
    • url is a relative or absolute link which this card can point to.

Pro tips

  1. Moonwalk has 3 in-built layouts:

    • post - for content
    • blog - for listing blog posts
    • home - for landing page you can change your index.md file to use either home or blog layout.

  2. It is extremely easy to tweak the color scheme.

    • for light mode, customize these css variables css html { --bg: #fcfcfc; --bg-secondary: #f1f2f4; --bg-subtle: #f6f7f8; --headings: #0f172a; --text: #2b2f36; --text-secondary: #5b6470; --links: #4f46e5; --highlight: #ffecb2; // light yellow --code-text: #9d174d; }
    • for dark mode customize these css variables css @mixin dark-appearance { html, body { --headings: #e6edf3; --links: #91a7ff; --highlight: #41c7c7; --bg: #15161d; --bg-secondary: #23242f; --bg-subtle: #1c1d26; --text: #c4ccd6; --text-secondary: #8b94a3; --code-text: #91a7ff; }; }

  3. Want different fonts? Moonwalk uses Geist / Geist Mono via two CSS variables. Override them in your own SCSS:

    :root {
--font-sans: "Inter", system-ui, sans-serif;
--font-mono: "JetBrains Mono", monospace;
}

    Don't forget to update the <link> to Google Fonts in _includes/head.html to match.

Optional features

Each of these is wired up in _config.yml under theme_config:

  • show_footnote_tooltips: true - when readers hover a kramdown footnote ref ([^1]), the footnote text appears in a small tooltip instead of forcing a scroll to the bottom.
  • show_link_previews: true - hover any internal post link to see a preview card with title, excerpt, and date. Powered by an auto-generated /search.json index.

To add client-side search anywhere on your site, drop {% raw %}{% include search.html %}{% endraw %} into a layout or page. It searches over titles, tags, and excerpts using the same /search.json.

To enable a drop-cap on a post's opening paragraph, add dropcap: true to the post's front matter.

To use the <details> collapsible style, just write native HTML in your Markdown:

<details>
  <summary>Long version</summary>
  Hidden by default, expanded on click.
</details>

Agent-friendly by default

LLM crawlers and coding agents read your site too. Moonwalk ships with two small Jekyll plugins so they can fetch clean Markdown instead of parsing HTML:

  • jekyll-markdown-output - emits a .md sibling for every post. A page rendered at /foo also exists as /foo.md with a small frontmatter block and the source Markdown. No layouts, no nav chrome, no theme toggles - just the content.
  • jekyll-llms-output - generates /llms.txt (a curated index) and /llms-full.txt (full content concatenated) following the llmstxt.org spec, so agents can discover and ingest your site in one fetch.

Both are wired up in _config.yml with sensible defaults:

plugins:
  - jekyll-markdown-output
  - jekyll-llms-output

markdown_output:
  collections: [posts]

llms_output:
  index:
    collections: [posts]
  full:
    collections: [posts]
    respect_markdown_output: true

Set enabled: false on either block to turn it off. For curated llms.txt content, drop a _data/llms.yml file with title, description, and sections - the plugin will use it instead of auto-generating. See each plugin's README for full configuration.

[!NOTE] GitHub Pages restricts plugins to a whitelist, and these two are not on it. If you host on GH Pages, build the site yourself in CI (Actions, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Vercel) or remove the plugins.

GitHub Markdown Alerts

Moonwalk supports GitHub-style Markdown Alerts. Use them in your posts like this:

> [!NOTE]
> Useful information that users should know, even when skimming content.

> [!TIP]
> Helpful advice for doing things better or more easily.

> [!IMPORTANT]
> Key information users need to know to achieve their goal.

> [!WARNING]
> Urgent info that needs immediate user attention to avoid problems.

> [!CAUTION]
> Advises about risks or negative outcomes of certain actions.

All five alert types are styled with color-coded left borders and icons, and work in both light and dark mode.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup and guidelines.

Development

  1. Run bin/bootstrap (or make setup) to install dependencies
  2. Run bin/start (or make serve) to start the dev server with live reload at http://127.0.0.1:4000
  3. Run bin/build (or make build) for a production build

When your theme is released, only the files in _layouts, _includes, _sass, _data, and assets tracked with Git will be bundled. To add a custom directory to your theme-gem, please edit the regexp in moonwalk.gemspec accordingly.

Acknowledgement

This theme's original base is no style please! theme created by Riccardo Graziosi - many thanks to him for creating a wonderful theme with nearly no css.

License

The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Other Projects

If you like Moonwalk, do check out my other projects

  • cookie - a free landing website boilerplate using Jekyll and Tailwind CSS
  • scoop - a Sinatra boilerplate project using Corneal, ActiveRecord, Capistrano, Puma & Nginx
  • soopr - a tool that supports you in content marketing
  • apicagent - a FREE API that extracts device details from user-agent string
  • pincodr - a FREE API for Indian pincodes
  • humangous - create public and private 'working with you' guides
  • blockr - a CLI tool to help you easily block and unblock websites
  • microrequests - a Python library to help you consume microservice efficiently

You can read more about me on my blog or follow me on Twitter - @abhinav

If you like my work, you can buy me a coffee