Welcome to the Icarus documentation site! Icarus is a simple, delicate, and modern theme for the static site generator Hexo. It strives to be elegant in design while simple and straightforward to use. Its versatile and flexible configuration system enables power users to lay out their sites to the finest details. Icarus also offers a wide range of plugins and widgets to meet your various customization and optimization needs. Moreover, its refreshed implementation enables better IDE support and third-party integration, which open to a sea of improvement possibilities.

Icarus’ default theme configuration file is _config.icarus.yml, in the root directory of your site, next to the site configuration file _config.yml. It defines the global layout and style settings of the theme and controls external features such as plugins and widgets. This article details the general configurations of the theme. It also explains what configuration files are used and how Icarus generates and validates these configurations.

Icarus includes a variant inspired by Material 3 Expressive. It brings softly tinted surfaces, rounded cards, pill-shaped controls, and flower-like accents to the familiar Icarus layout. Navigation items and buttons change shape on hover or keyboard focus, while menus open with spring-like motion.

Icarus includes a second variant called Cyberpunk, for those who like dark-themed blogs. It takes the look of a city at night from cyberpunk fiction: a dark screen lit by neon signs in yellow, cyan, and magenta, panels framed like a heads-up display with chamfered corners, scanlines, and a neon grid running to the horizon at the bottom of the page. The titles of the posts glitch when you hover over them. It should be noted that it uses recent web styling features that are not working correctly in some legacy browsers, including Internet Explorer and legacy Microsoft Edge.

The article answers some frequently asked questions about Icarus. If your question is not answered here, you can also refer to Icarus User Guide, Hexo documentation, and GitHub Issues. Additionally, you may find help from other Icarus users on GitHub Discussions.

The default and Material 3 Expressive variants of Icarus can be dark, either all the time or only when the browser or operating system of your visitors asks for a dark color scheme. This has long been requested by the community (#1108). The dark colors live in the same stylesheet as the light ones, so there is no extra request. This post itself is always displayed with the dark appearance, while the rest of this site uses appearance: auto and follows the color scheme of your system.

Apart from the tag helpers supported by Hexo natively, as described in Hexo Built-in Tag Helpers, Icarus also offers several other useful tag helpers to customize the display of your content.

Tag plugins are different from post tags. They are ported from Octopress and provide a useful way for you to quickly add specific content to your posts.

Choosing the right CDN providers can significantly reduce the page loading time of your viewers. Icarus lets you pick among several built-in CDN provider options for serving third-party libraries and asset files used by Icarus.