Important Disclaimer

Starting from 27/6/2022, we switch to another Theme, Minimal Mistakes. It is much easier to change skin colours there. The first part is no longer relevant — unless you are still using Minima!

Minima

Jekyll’s default theme, Minima, provides 4 possible skins. This page (as of 22/5/2022) is created using the solarized skin.

Installation

Go to the GitHub Page for Minima, copy the codes in assets and _sass to your VSCode (Use VSCode Please!).

Note that for this Tutorial _sass, you only need to download _base.scss, _layout.scss and initialize.scss

Of course it is always best to download all the files in Github whenever you use a new theme!

Change the code in initialize.scss from:

@import
  "minima/custom-variables", // Hook to override predefined variables.
  "minima/base",             // Defines element resets.
  "minima/layout",           // Defines structure and style based on CSS selectors.
  "minima/custom-styles"     // Hook to override existing styles.
;

to

@import
  "minima/custom-variables", // Hook to override predefined variables.
  "minima/_base",             // Defines element resets.
  "minima/_layout",           // Defines structure and style based on CSS selectors.
  "minima/custom-styles"     // Hook to override existing styles.
;

Then download classic.scss, dark.scss and solarized.scss under _sass/minima/skins.

There is NO NEED to download solarized-dark.scss. Whenever you want solarized-dark mode, just do the following:

$sol-is-dark: true;

Before changing the theme:

Assuming you are chaning to solarized theme. Change the settings in style.scss to

@import
"minima/skins/solarized",
"minima/initialize";

Then change the settings in _config.yaml to

minima:
  skin: solarized

Conclusion

I personally think all these themes look terrible, but that’s how you do it. You can change some settings by adding custom-styles.scss and custom-variables.scss, it’s a more elegant way of changing things, but you can just change the codes in _base.scss and _layout.scss.

Minimal Mistakes?

Download all the necessary files from Github. Whenever you want to change your theme go to _config.yaml and find this line

minimal_mistakes_skin    : "dark" # "air", "aqua", "contrast", "dark", "dirt", "neon", "mint", "plum", "sunrise"

I am using Dark theme as of 1/10/2022.

Updated: