Hugo 0.164.0

Release Date: July 6, 2026

Hugo 0.164.0 is here — bringing Chroma dark/light theme pairs, new template functions, Pandoc citation support, and a critical performance regression fix.

⚡ Performance Push

A performance regression introduced in Hugo v0.128.0 has been fixed. Sites with many pages should see build times return to expected levels. The fix addresses a slowdown that was particularly noticeable on larger projects.

🎨 Chroma Dark/Light Pairs

Syntax highlighting just got a major upgrade. The Chroma highlighter now supports dark/light mode pairs natively. Use the new flags on the hugo gen chromastyles command to generate stylesheets that automatically adapt to the user's color scheme preference.

🔧 New Template Functions

encoding.HexEncode / encoding.HexDecode — Encode and decode hexadecimal strings directly in your templates.
crypto.Hash — Compute cryptographic hashes of content at build time, useful for integrity checks and fingerprinting.

📄 Pandoc Citation Support

Hugo now supports Pandoc citations out of the box. If you use Pandoc as your markup converter, you can include academic citations in your content and have them rendered correctly.

📂 Sub Paths in .Render Layouts

The Page.Render method now supports sub paths in the layouts argument, giving you more flexibility when rendering partial content from different template directories.

🛠️ Other Improvements

markup.rst.syntaxHighlight — New configuration option for reStructuredText syntax highlighting.
Case-insensitive template name lookup — Template resolution is now case-insensitive, reducing cross-platform issues.
Error on missing templates — .Render now returns a clear error when the specified template is not found, instead of silently failing.
IsSet warning improvements — Better warning messages when using IsSet with unsupported types.

⬆️ Upgrade Now

Update your Hugo installation:

brew upgrade hugo
# or
go install github.com/gohugoio/hugo@latest

Hugo 0.164.0 is a recommended upgrade for all users, especially those on larger sites who may have been impacted by the performance regression.