Hugo is a popular static site generator written in the Go programming language. Hugo is jam-packed with features, but one of its main selling points is speed — Hugo takes mere seconds to generate a site with thousands of pages. Smashing Magazine recently switched to Hugo from WordPress.

Hugo has excellent Markdown support out of the box. By default, Hugo uses the Goldmark Markdown processor which is fully CommonMark-compliant. See the configuration instructions to learn more about the extensions you can configure. You can change Hugo’s Goldmark settings in the config.toml file, as shown below.

baseURL = "http://mysite.org/"
languageCode = "en-us"
title = "My Site"
theme = "ananke"

[markup]
taskLists = false

Hugo Markdown Support

Hugo provides support for the following Markdown elements.

Element Support Notes
Headings Yes
Paragraphs Yes
Line Breaks Yes
Bold Yes
Italic Yes
Blockquotes Yes
Ordered Lists Yes
Unordered Lists Yes
Code Yes
Horizontal Rules Yes
Links Yes
Images Yes
Tables Yes
Fenced Code Blocks Yes
Syntax Highlighting Yes
Footnotes Yes
Heading IDs Yes
Definition Lists Yes
Strikethrough Yes
Task Lists Yes
Emoji (copy and paste) Yes
Emoji (shortcodes) Yes
Highlight No
Subscript No
Superscript No
Automatic URL Linking Yes
Disabling Automatic URL Linking Yes
HTML Yes Disabled by default if you’re using Goldmark. To enable, set the unsafe option to true in the Goldmark configuration.

See Also