Forgejo is fantastic. I do think it could use a fresh coat of paint from a designer but it’s otherwise really good.

Gitea (what Forgejo forked from) recently stole the sidebar on repos from GitHub and I think that would be great for Forgejo to steal too…

Forgejo themed by Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo (the codeberg theme is extremely low contrast)

Forgejo default: https://v15.next.forgejo.org/pparaxan/quark

Forgejo themed by Lix: https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix

Gitea: https://gitea.com/gitea/awesome-gitea

Gitea themed by Blender: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender

I personally like Blender’s Gitea theme better than the rest but I guess that’s subjective. In dark mode I do not like the low contrast Codeberg theme or the default Forgejo theme, but all of the instances custom themes look great.

As far as Git forges go in general though.. tangled is very pretty https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core I think more power user oriented software should be comfortable with compact interfaces

It's fascinating how fast the Forgejo I host at my university's laboratory loads from my home network. Every page load is <100ms. I think it goes to show how much bloat we don't realise exists in modern webapps.

Ideally those forgejos would safe enough to be on the public internet (and using a federation protocol like activitypub) so we don't have to go through a centralized service such as github and not locked behind private networks (such as tailscale nets)