It’s that time of year again; I've switched static site generators once more! I know, I know… I have a problem… I am now using Hugo with the Blackburn theme.
So if we recap, I've used Jekyll and Hexo in the past, the latter I made the switch to earlier this year. So why change again? Does Hugo offer substantially more than Hexo? To be honest, part of it is just my own addiction to changing my website. I get bored when it stays the same for too long, and look for new ways to modify it. That’s where my only real problem with Hexo lies: the community.
Hexo, being of Chinese origins, has a predominantly Chinese community. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, I don’t speak Chinese. As such, it can be a struggle to wade through various threads and GitHub repositories that either require the assistance of Google Translate or a lot of guess work. This becomes especially troublesome when trying to find new themes, as many are documented only in Chinese, making it way more tedious than it needs to be to modify them.
Enter Hugo. Hugo’s community (at least from what I've seen) is majority English-speaking. This made learning about how to use it exponentially easier than learning Hexo. In addition, I've found Hugo’s structure to be easy to work with and the various enhancements it brings with it to the static generation game are much appreciated. Will I stick with Hugo in the long run? I'm not making an promises. But as of right now, I'm enjoying the change.