Swimmer is an opinionated yet invitingly simple Jekyll theme that extends and builds off of Poole, the foundational Jekyll setup by @mdo. The name comes from “David’s Poole” → David Schwimmer → Swimmer.
Poole provides a clear and concise foundation for any Jekyll site. Swimmer takes that foundation and adds a full-featured, modern theme with dark mode, a responsive sidebar, self-hosted variable fonts, and Tailwind CSS v4 styling.
This demo site was last updated June 19, 2026.
Learn more and contribute on GitHub.
What’s included
Swimmer ships with everything from Poole, plus a set of opinionated defaults and features:
- Complete Jekyll setup (layouts, config, 404, RSS feed, posts, archive page, and example page)
- Dark mode that respects system preferences with a manual toggle, persisted in
localStorage - Responsive post sidebar — hamburger overlay on mobile, fixed list on desktop
- Self-hosted variable fonts (Inter + Roboto Mono) preloaded as WOFF2
- Tailwind CSS v4 styling via
@tailwindcss/cli - Syntax highlighting with separate light and dark color schemes
- Mobile-friendly design with scalable
remunits - Dedicated landing page with logo
Browser support
Swimmer targets the latest versions of Chrome, Safari (mobile and desktop), Firefox, and Edge.
Download
Swimmer is developed on and hosted with GitHub. Head to the GitHub repository for downloads, bug reports, and feature requests.
Thanks!