Kavu

Named after the കാവ് (kavu), the sacred groves of Kerala: small, protected, deliberately overgrown.

A monospace, terminal-inspired Hugo theme for digital gardens and personal knowledge bases. Designed around the principles of interconnected note-taking, with support for note maturity stages, network graph visualization, and dense cross-linking.

Live site: stultus.in/notes

Preview

Homepage — dark and light:

Dark	Light

Network graph — force-directed view of all notes coloured by maturity:

Dark	Light

Browse-by-topic and the full note index:

Dark	Light

Features

Homepage

• Live garden statistics (total notes, evergreen/growing/seedling counts)
• Recently Tended and Most Connected entry points
• Collapsible topic cards for browsing by theme
• Filterable and sortable full note index
• Random note discovery button
• Interactive network graph with search, hover highlighting, and fullscreen mode

Note Pages

• Inline metadata bar: maturity status, dates, reading time
• Summary subtitle and tag pills
• Automatic backlinks with summaries
• Random note navigation

Tag System

• Tag cloud with note counts
• Sortable tag pages (Recent / A-Z / Status)
• Related tags discovery based on co-occurrence

Network Graph

• Force-directed graph of all notes and their connections
• Hover to highlight a node and its neighbors with labels
• Label collision avoidance
• Search, zoom, fit-to-view, and fullscreen controls
• Keyboard shortcuts: / search, F fit, Shift+F fullscreen, +/- zoom

Design

• Monospace typography (JetBrains Mono, IBM Plex Mono, Fira Code)
• Nord-inspired color palette with CSS variables
• Full dark mode support
• Responsive layout
• Wikilink-style [[bracket]] rendering for internal links
• Malayalam font support (Manjari)

Note Maturity

Notes use a status frontmatter field to indicate maturity:

Status	Meaning
seeding	Stub or rough idea
growing	Developed draft, partially linked
evergreen	Polished, well-linked, stable understanding

Getting Started

# Add as a submodule
git submodule add git@github.com:stultus/kavu.git themes/kavu

Set in hugo.toml:

theme = "kavu"
themesdir = "./themes"

Frontmatter

---
title: "Your Note Title"
date: 2025-01-01
lastmod: 2025-01-15
draft: false
tags: ["topic-a", "topic-b"]
summary: "One-line description of the note."
status: "seeding"  # seeding | growing | evergreen
type: "note"       # note | essay | moc | source
---

Internal Links

Use absolute paths for internal links to ensure the theme's link resolver works correctly:

[Note Title](/notes/note-slug/)

Theme credit

Kavu renders a small "Built with Kavu by stultus" line in the footer by default. If you'd rather not include it, set in your hugo.toml:

[params]
  hideThemeCredit = true

Keeping it on is appreciated — it helps other people find the theme.

Origin

Kavu was originally forked from paulmartins/hugo-digital-garden-theme, which was inspired by Maggie Appleton's website. It has since been substantially rewritten with a new design system, homepage, note pages, tag system, network graph, and CSS architecture.

License

MIT