Hugo, without the terminal.

⇧⌘N gives you two templates. The HugoKit Starter is a complete, working site – kept as a real, running Hugo project inside the app rather than a pile of snippets. Blank is the plain output of hugo new site with a small welcome page.

• The Starter always brings the essentials – a 404 page, robots.txt, a sitemap, an RSS feed, an SEO partial and light/dark mode – plus an archive, a colophon, a ⌘K search palette, a sharing image drawn per page and the whole site as llms.txt.
• You pick the rest up front: a blog with sample posts, a projects section, an about page, a theme toggle and tags.
• The Starter is TOML-only and needs Hugo 0.146 or newer; Blank lets you choose the config format.
• Either one can initialise a git repository, open the site and start the server the moment it is done.

A layout file is invisible until a page renders it. Template Preview (⇧⌘T) puts your layouts on the left and the rendered page on the right, served by your own dev server – so you can see what single.html actually does without hunting for a URL that exercises it.

• Your layouts/ and every theme’s layouts/ in one tree – and where both define the same file, the project’s version wins, exactly as Hugo resolves it.
• Preview with picks a real page from your content that the selected template actually renders; partials, shortcodes and baseof fall back to the home page.
• The preview is live: save the file in your editor and it reloads like any other page.
• It needs the dev server running – if it is stopped, the panel says so and offers to start it.

The Themes page lists what is installed in themes/. New Blank Theme scaffolds a placeholder to build on – minimal layouts and styles, not a finished design – by running Hugo’s own hugo new theme underneath.

• Letters, numbers and hyphens; the name becomes the folder under themes/.
• A checkbox decides whether the sample pages hugo new theme generates come along. layouts/, assets/ and archetypes/ are left alone either way.
• Set it as the active theme on creation, and the next build uses it.
• Removing a theme deletes themes/ and touches nothing else in the site.

The Content page counts what is in the site and lists the files. It is built for a typo, a front matter field, a date – not for writing. A front matter inspector sits beside each file for exactly those fields; real writing stays in your own editor, and the preview reloads on save either way.

• Pages, sections, word counts and images per site – plus how many are drafts, future-dated or expired. A page bundle shows as one entry with its images, not a folder of loose files.
• Edit the front matter in a panel beside the file – title, description, date, tags and categories, with suggestions drawn from the site’s own taxonomies – or use the Raw tab, a plain monospaced editor with an explicit Save (⌘S). Both edit the same text.
• See every tag and category across the site, catch a duplicate spelling, and rename one everywhere in a single pass you can undo.
• Close a file with unsaved changes and HugoKit asks first.
• Open in editor is one click away, in whatever editor you already use.

Your config is the file most likely to break a site, and the one you edit least often – so you never quite remember what the keys are called. HugoKit gives it a form, a raw text tab, and one rule: nothing is written to disk until you have seen the diff.

• The form is grouped: Basics, Build, Author, Params, Markup, Taxonomies, Main Menu and Additional Fields.
• The two tabs are the same document – type a key in Raw and it turns up in the form, and the other way round.
• Save does not save. It shows every changed key, old value against new; you approve, and then it is written.
• TOML, YAML or JSON – the format is read from the file, and keys you never touched keep their place, their spelling and their comments.

Hugo’s reference material, indexed and searchable inside the app, in a window of its own (⌘2). It is there so a forgotten function name does not cost you a browser tab and twenty minutes.

• 195 entries across twelve categories: functions, methods, page and site variables, templates, partials, shortcodes, front matter, config, content, build and performance.
• Opens in its own window and stays out of the way of the site you are working on.

The things you do every day have a key. Everything else is one ⌘K away in the command palette.

• ⌘P publish · ⇧⌘P preflight · ⌘D deploy
• ⇧⌘H site health · ⇧⌘T template preview · ⌘2 Hugo Reference
• ⌘O open a site · ⇧⌘N create one · ⌘, settings

HugoKit does not need its window open to be useful. Close it and the app keeps running in the menu bar, with every site and its status one click away.

• Start or stop any site from the menu, and open its localhost URL in the browser.
• The status dot follows the server: green running, amber busy, red failed, grey idle.
• Don’t want it? Turn the icon off in Settings → General.

Native macOS notifications for the things that finish while you are looking at something else. Every event has its own toggle, so you can keep the publish result and silence the rest.

• Six events: server started, server stopped unexpectedly, build succeeded, build failed, publish succeeded, publish failed.
• The toggles live in Settings → Notifications.
• If you have denied notification permission, HugoKit says so and links straight to System Settings.