Hugo's documentation isn't good, no doubt. But compared to Jekyll's docs, there's at least a lot of (reference) content. Jekyll's docs feel like a beginner-friendly tutorial, but from there you have to figure out everything else yourself, often requiring you to scour the internet and read the source code.

> I have migrated from Jekyll to Hugo for my own website, but the whole Hugo project is just weird. It took me like a year to migrate my simple website because of all the different paper cuts that drained my will to work on it.

My blog's migration anno took only a few days, including a template creation from scratch. My template is still unfinished unfortunately, as Hugo was missing features I needed for my vision back then, and since then I gave up a bit on blogging because of the papercuts mentioned, and the immense timesink that is creating reasonable quality content for publishing. (I do paper-based journalling mostly nowadays since then).

Recently just reviewed the Hugo changelogs since the version I use, and now it knows everything I need to finish up my blog (especially features around images and internationalization were missing, since my blog is not in English, and Hugo used to miss a lot for tiny stuff supporting non-english sites properly, eg. date string localization, sorting for localized tags, like the 'abc' in my language starts as 'aábc', but á got sorted after Z (yes, capiztal Z) if I recall correctly, making localized tags hard to use.). I had some hacks for some in place, but it was tiresome. Now Hugo has all the bells and whistles I need, even more than enough... It is hard to wrap my head around the plethora of features and new concepts. I wonder if the docs cover my usecases, or I'll need to do some Sherlock Holmes stuff once again, to get going...

So the takeaway of this rambling? Hugo is great, it is fast, and by now it probably knows everything one can reasonably need. But man, it is hard to learn, it has become a huge topic, as sitebuilding naturally has its depths, just like any other topic, once real life problems are to be solved with it. The docs? Not great, not terrible. Overall I still recommend it over anything else, as the docs are still okayish for basic stuff. I like it, it is a great project. I love that almost every changelog includes that it got faster a little bit. Atypical for current software project. And it is fast indeed. (experience from a 5 year old release) I have worked with some trendy javascript based web authoring tools at workplace, and man they were all sluggish and had way worse developer experience than Hugo, also their docs weren't better at all. (has nothing to with Js apart from being popular nowadays)