I was looking for something simple like bearblog[dot]dev or Obsidian publish in WordPress world but haven't found anything yet. The most simple & clean theme I found was Independent Publisher theme (the v1 with left sidebar, not v2) but It was abanndoned. I'm a blogger and I just want to have a simple blog to write. Ideally, It should be a wordpress theme that I can install, change my site title & tagline then write immediately, like Substack or Medium. I don't even care about the fonts, colors. I don't even need a sidebar (bearblog doesn't have a sidebar) as long as It looks clean enough. Plus, I hate FSE themes, I want to customize the menus and widgets in Dashboard > Appearance > Menus, Widgets in classic style. It's intuitive & fast. Also, I want the theme must be fast in both backend and frontend, minimum number of features, just enough to write with clean design. It'd better have nice editor styled (like Ghost, Medium and Substack). But many classic themes don't do this job. The editor was in default state. So I've just created myself a theme and publish it for free on Github. I call it Indie theme. Only 37k css, no javascript, no builder, no google font (I used Verdana font), 180k theme file (half of that is screenshot.jpg file), almost no theme options, only basic wordpress options. I feel It's enough for a site. It's very very lightweight and fast, both in backend and frontend. I found that, WordPress is quite fast & satisfying if theme developers don't put ton of shits into it.

Indie theme

Ultra-fast & no-nonsense wordpress theme

Ultra-fast & no-nonsense wordpress theme