Differences between Hylia and Virga

Credit where credit’s due. #

First, Hylia is a great Eleventy starter kit, and I’ve learned a lot about Eleventy from this kit so I thank Andy Bell for creating and sharing Hylia.

If Hylia were great, why Virga exists? #

Easy and short answer is because this is how I learn new stuff.

I’ve been reading a lot of good things about Eleventy, but I haven’t had chance to get my hand on it.

I had been running this blog(sorta) called “Frontend Weekly” for while on Medium, but I’ve wanted to go back hosting it on my own.

So I’ve decided to get my hand dirty once for all to use Eleventy to host my blog.

Hylia is very easy to learn, and it is also easy to extend for my own needs, yet I want to change a few things about it.

What Virga had done differently from Hylia #

While Hylia uses Sass, Virga uses PostCSS.
I’ve used Sass in production, and I do think it’s great companion for writing CSS but relying heavily on Sass make me feel like I’ve detached from reality of CSS.

I realized that I haven’t used new CSS spec like Custom Properties, Custom Media Queries and/or :matches pseudo-class because I don’t really need to since I’ve already “using” them in Sass.

So in Virga, I’ve decided to use PostCSS with PostCSS Preset Env alone(well, plus Autoprefixer, postcss-import and cssnano) so I can write CSS.

Other than the choice of preprocessor, Virga and Hylia is almost same.
There are slight differences in directory structure, but those are come from personal preference.

Oh, I’ve dropped few small features from Hylia, too.
The most notable would be use of Netlify CMS.

I’m not sure why you choose Virga over Hylia, to be honest, but if you do, please be aware those differences.

Virga is incomplete and minimum on purpose so that I can extend it faster.

What’s with the name? #

As you can probably tell, I’m not native English speaker, and I have no idea Virga is meteorological term(well, I’ve never heard the term in Japanese, which is my native language, either).

Virga comes from a name of backpack by Granite Gear which I own and love. I actually have color scheme set up taken from the bag.
While I’ve ended up not using the scheme, the name stuck.