Is it possible to override the style of a remote theme?

[lynxlynxlynx]

Motivation

remote_theme is a valid way to use the theme, but the style customization part of the docs doesn't mention anything about it.

Naively I tried adding a assets/css/style.scss with

---
---
@import "main";
// some rules, starting with disabling the a:focus outline

And without "main", as per the docs, but it just doesn't build, since the file isn't found. So I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if it's not supposed to work at all.

GitHub Pages is looking only in _sass, so does the whole main.scss file from upstream need to be manually imported (copied)?

Suggestion

The docs should be explicit whether it's possible at all and if so, how to do it.
Thanks for the great theme!

[lynxlynxlynx]

Playing around some more, copying main works, so it looks like just https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/docs/stylesheets/#customizing needs a mention. I can prepare a PR if you want.

[mmistakes]

Remote themes are almost identical to Ruby gem themes. All _layouts, _includes and Sass files can be customized by adding local versions of the files in your repo. These will overwritethe ones bundled in the gem or files pulled remotely via remote_theme.

Steps for customizing the styles are what are mentioned on that link above. You copy assets/css/main.scss and customize as needed.

[lynxlynxlynx]

The first bit was not clear, yeah. I've set up jekyll several times before, once on GH, but this remote_theme thing seems newer. And it's counter-intuitive, though very welcome, that you can override stuff just like the files were actually there.

[mmistakes]

The theme assumes the user has a working knowledge of Jekyll's theme capabilities and it's plugins, that's why I don't take a deep dive into all this in the documentation. Remote themes are newer than theme gems but neither are what I'd call new. They came out years ago...

The short of it is, GitHub Pages limits the gems/plugins you can use for security reasons. Most 3rd party themes aren't supported for this reason. To get around that the remote theme plugin was developed. Theme gems and remote themes are pretty much interchangeable in functionality.

The big difference is how you assign them to your repo in _config.yml. Other than that if you can do something with a theme gem you can do it with the remote theme.

[lynxlynxlynx]

Not much of that is new to me, but the docs mention remote themes (and GH Pages) specifically in some places and not others, so there's room for improvement. Eg. you don't need to run bundler on GHP either. If you think it's not worthwhile, just close this report, I mind. ¯_(ツ)_/¯