Half way through customizing a Hugo theme, I suddenly realized that I don't need a theme at all. Hugo can be used themelessly, where you just write templates specifically for your site. Everything was so much easier from there.

That was my experience too. There is/was no formal standard for creating themes, just an empty dir (which they consider a feature). Even if they had one or two "official themes" that would have helped tremendously.

Instead we spent a week researching how popular 3rd party themes did things, and made a hybrid. Then we moved away completely. I really wanted it to work for us and we were so close. Hugo is so fast and is brilliant on a couple of things.... but barely missed.

I can't remember exactly but with what we were doing we were going to be heavily dependant on their Scratchpad, which felt like a hack. It's all just hacks, and they like it. Lack of solid conventions, and they LOVE it.

wait do you have a repo example of this or some sort of link?

My theme is so simple I think redoing it as themeless may be better

Replace the themes directory with the "layouts" directory which contains all the templates. I do my blog this way. https://github.com/PowerSnail/PowerSnail.github.io

OK I see, but even though it's themeless you still have to follow the Hugo theming structure (_default, partials, index.html, etc). Mine is the same as that, it's just nested into the themes directory.

It's that theming structure that was a pain to figure out the first time for me

Yeah, that template look-up hierarchy is unavoidable. The benefit of being themeless is mostly organizational: one config file, one asset directory, etc.

Totally agree on this. Took me a bit to wrap my head around it vs other templating I’ve used.

Also figuring out the variable structure took me a bit, but now the docs make sense to me.

My theme is super simple. A few templates, 1 CSS file, and a tiny amount of vanilla JS. I just let Hugo + CSS do most of the lifting.

I think some folks have had bad experiences with themes that layer a JS framework on Hugo, though. That may be a better case for a completely JS ecosystem.

There’s a lot of good options. That’s a good problem to have. Just use what you like, I guess.