Aplós

A sleek, contemporary, and purposefully designed theme for Steno

Important

If you want to see the documentation/guide check https://aplos.gxbs.dev.

Note

Aplós is now a Steno theme — this branch replaces the old VitePress theme. The VitePress version is archived at aplosdev/vitepress.

Features

• Lightweight and minimalistic, powered by Steno.
• Elegantly styled with a primary color theme for a visually pleasing experience.
• Mobile-friendly design with support for dark mode.
• Optimized for social media sharing with meta cards.
• Utilizes premium fonts: Inter for text and Geist Mono for code snippets.
• Local development made easy with Deno/JSR, no node_modules required to run the theme itself.

Name

The name 'Aplós', pronounced as /aplós/ is the Romanized representation of the Greek word 'Απλός,' which translates to 'Simple'. This naming choice showcases the essence of the project — it's dedication to providing users with a straightforward and modern web experience. Aplós is centered around the philosophy of simplicity, aiming to deliver an uncomplicated and contemporary solution for website creation.

Try & Use

Create a Steno project:

deno create jsr:@steno/init

Choose Aplós when prompted, or set one line in content/.steno/config.yml:

theme: jsr:@gabs/aplos

Then run:

deno task dev

That is enough for a complete site. Add Markdown files to content/; folders become routes and index.md becomes the folder homepage. You can check the next steps by looking at the Guide.

A practical configuration

Everything is optional except Steno's normal site metadata:

title: My Site
description: Notes, guides, and articles
author: Ada Lovelace
contentDir: content
output: dist
shortUrls: true
theme: jsr:@gabs/aplos

themeConfig:
  accent: "#55b458"
  links: icons
  nav:
    links:
      - { title: Guide, url: /guide/ }
      - { title: Blog, url: /blog/ }
    git: https://github.com/example/example
  footer:
    startYear: "2026"
    sourcecode:
      show: true
      link: https://github.com/example/example

Start small. Add configuration only when you need to change a default.

Write pages

An ordinary page is ordinary Markdown—frontmatter is optional:

# Hello

This page is ready to publish.

Use layout: helpful to add "go to top" and issue links:

---
title: Installation
layout: helpful
---

Articles

Create content/posts/hello.md:

---
layout: article
title: Hello, Steno
description: My first article.
date: 2026-08-10
author: [Ada Lovelace]
tags: [steno, notes]
---

Register the collection once:

collections:
  posts:
    sortBy: date
    order: desc

Then create a listing page with layout: articles. Aplós supplies filtering, dates, and tags automatically.

Previous and next links are explicit and predictable:

prev: { url: /posts/previous/, title: Previous post }
next: { url: /posts/next/, title: Next post }

Useful options

Option	What it changes
accent	Derives the light and dark color palette
accentDark	Optionally overrides the dark-mode accent
links: icons	Adds arrows to internal and external links
numericHeadings: true	Numbers headings site-wide
minimal: true	Hides article-specific chrome
webFonts: false	Uses system fonts with no font request
nav.show: false	Hides the floating navigation island

nav.title falls back to the site title. nav.rss and nav.git add icon links. Footer configuration supports links, copyright, attribution, license, source code, and a short message.

Markdown extras

GitHub-style admonitions work without a plugin:

> [!TIP] Tip Keep the configuration small.

Images support Aplós modifiers in the URL hash:

![Screenshot](/screenshot.png#small#shadow)

Available modifiers include small, medium, full, shadow, mono, invert, sepia, blur, pixel, static, not-rounded, start, end, transparency, and no-border.

The table of contents is generated automatically from h2–h6 headings. You can supply an explicit toc array in frontmatter when you need custom labels or ordering.

Icons

Aplós includes a small self-hosted bold subset of Phosphor Icons for navigation, links, callouts, articles, and theme actions. Icons inherit the surrounding text color and need no font, script, package installation, or CDN request. The bundled Phosphor assets are MIT licensed.

Layouts

• layout — normal pages; this is the default.
• helpful — normal content plus helpful actions.
• article — article metadata, reading time, tags, and previous/next links.
• articles — filterable listing from collections.posts.
• notfound — Aplós 404 page; use it in content/404.md.

Development

If you want to contribute to Aplós, make sure to fork the repository and clone it with git clone or gh repo clone.

The five layouts share ShellStart and ShellEnd, so document structure, assets, navigation, TOC, and footer are maintained once. Sass is split by responsibility and compiled when Steno loads the theme.

deno task dev      # live fixture
deno task check    # fmt, lint, types, build, doctor

The demo under demo/ is the complete Aplós documentation site and exercises every supported layout; it always uses the latest code from this branch, so you can see the latest changes and use it as the development environment. If you happen to find any issues, please report them in the Issues section.

Know your rights

This project is under the MIT license:

• Freedom to Use: You have the right to use the software for any purpose, whether it's personal, academic, or commercial.
• Freedom to Modify: You can modify the source code of the software to suit your needs or preferences.
• Freedom to Distribute: You have the right to distribute the software, whether in its original form or modified, to others.
• Collaboration: You can collaborate with others on the software's development and improvement.
• No License Compatibility Issues: You can combine the MIT-licensed software with other software, even if they use different licenses.
• No Usage Restrictions: There are no restrictions on the technologies or fields of use, giving you maximum flexibility.

MIT, copyright 2024–present Gabriel Cozma. See third-party licenses for the bundled Phosphor icon subset.

Thanks ❤ & Credits️

• Duckquill, from where I got inspired to create this project (and many ideas are from there)
• Hari Rana for style-related feedback and suggestions
• Inter, used for all Sans Serif text.
• Geist Mono, used for all monospaced text.
• Steno, which is used to power Aplós.
• Everyone that supported the project.