matcha

A wizard that generates a personal site shaped like a command-line shell. Pure HTML / CSS / JS / jQuery output. Zero build step. Deploy by uploading.

you@host[~]:  $ help
blog [slug|n]    list blog posts, or read one
contact          show contact information
fortune          print a random fortune
help             show this list
myself           about me
theme [name]     cycle theme; or `theme <name>`, `theme list`
weather <city>   current weather for a city
...

Why

Personal sites are getting templated, vibe-coded, hostable-on-Vercel/Netlify, generic. This is the opposite. Every command is intentional, the output is one folder of static files you understand and own, and the result has personality. Plus, everyone wanted a website like my personal one!

Install

Download the binary for your OS from the releases page, or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/catsmells/matcha
cd matcha
go build -o matcha

Use

./matcha

The wizard asks you a few questions and writes a finished site to ./my-site/ (or wherever you point it). Upload the contents of that folder to your web host's public directory.

What You Get

• index.html - The shell, single file, ~30KB
• blog/ - Drop new posts here, edit posts.json
• projects/ - Same scaffold for projects
• 404.html, 403.html, etc. - Themed error pages
• .htaccess - Wires error pages on Apache/LiteSpeed hosts
• webring.json - List of personal sites you link to

Every part is editable plain text. Re-run the wizard if you want to regenerate from scratch with different options, or just edit the output.

Features Available in the Wizard

Sections: blog (with Atom feed builder), projects, reading log, webring.

Utility Commands: weather, ip, define, qr, hex/rgb color preview, stock quotes, rss reader.

Flavor Commands: fortune, cowsay, sudo joke, neofetch, lichess daily chess puzzle, wordle.

Themes: light/dark, japanese (paper/sakura/matcha/sumi), CRT (amber/phosphor), dev classics (solarized/nord).

Blog Social Share Buttons: copy link, twitter, mastodon, linkedin, email.

Built Using

• huh for the TUI
• jQuery in the generated output (yes really, it works fine and is small)
• go:embed for the templates

Inspiration

The original implementation lives at drcat.fun. This generator extracts the reusable parts so others can have their own.

License

MIT. Do whatever you want with it, but contact me if you'd like to use it commercially.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. The codebase is small enough to read in an afternoon. See docs/developing.md for how the templating works.

Cool Bits

• I regularly browse the web development threads on 4chan and Lainchan. If I see a cool site using matcha that attributes my site, I'll mention it on the main repository here!
• Theme bundles I find cool or interesting will be linked on this main repository. I love seeing cool color combinations!