Vane is a documentation theme for Kite, drawn on paper in ink: a home page with a kite in its sky, documents in a tree with their own order, news, and search, by day and by night. It is named after the weather vane, which turns to show which way the wind blows: a docs site is there to show the way, and Kite flies on the wind.
It is the theme www.kite.plus is built with, and it
was the second theme written against Kite's theme contract, which Kite froze
as kite/v1 once a theme this different from the default one had been
written. Vane 1.0 is written to that contract.
Vane lives only in this repository. Kite ships just its default theme and does not bundle this one.
Vane is drawn on warm paper in ink, with a faint grain and headings in a serif. At night the paper turns to a dark sky. The accent color you choose draws the kite, the seals that number the features, the underline of links and the keyboard focus; buttons stay in ink.
- A home page: a badge for news and a headline under a sky where a paper kite flies, its string tied down by the buttons and a command a reader can copy; at night the kite glows under the moon and stars. Under it, two windows of the product with a note between them, the features as paper tags hung on one string, each with a small sample the theme draws, a band of pictures, the latest news and closing cards.
- Docs in the groups and the order you set, each page with the tree beside it, the time it takes to read, a table of contents, and links to the pages before and after it.
- Code blocks with a bar that names the language, such as Terminal or YAML, and a button that copies the code.
- Search: by title across the docs tree, from
/orCtrl K. With the official Search plugin on the site, the box in the header opens its search of the whole text instead. - News from Kite's posts, with tags, categories and an RSS feed.
- Day and night: the button in the header steps through automatic (the reader's system), night and day, and the browser remembers the choice. The new scheme spreads from the button as a circle where the browser has view transitions, and switches at once where it has not or where the reader asks for less motion.
Every page works without a script, and nothing is loaded from a third party. Headings use Noto Serif SC when the site loads it, as www.kite.plus does, and the serifs of the reader's system otherwise.
Drop the zip of a release on the upload tile under Settings → Theme in
Kite's studio, or unzip it into a site's themes folder and set theme.name
to vane in kite.yaml. Then list the docs in the docs tree, the way
the example site's kite.yaml does. Every setting is
described in the settings reference.
The header draws the site's main menu, which the studio edits under Settings → Menus; until the site has one, it shows the header links set under Navigation in the theme's settings.
Vane 1.0 asks for Kite 0.1.4 or later, the release that brought site menus.
example/ is a Kite site that uses the theme through a link,
themes/vane to the root of this repository, and that documents the theme
at the same time:
cd example
kite runA change is ready when both of these pass:
kite theme verify .
(cd example && kite build --verify)scripts/package.sh packs dist/vane-<version>.zip, one folder named
vane holding theme.yaml and what the theme is made of, which the studio
installs as it is. Tag the release and attach the zip.
The plan, with what Kite has to add for the rest of it, is in docs/design/README.md.