I am aware of the pagetemplate plugin, but I'd like to style my pages completely differently. Modifications in /usr/share/ikiwiki are not an option, and I'd rather not snapshot that directory and make my changes to the detached copy.

Instead, I wonder whether it would be possible to create an overlay directory such that ikiwiki first looks for page templates there, and only goes to /usr/share/ikiwiki if the overlay does not satisfy the request.

madduck: Update: I did try setting templates in ikiwiki.setup but could not get it to work. Then I found in the code that ikiwiki already checks that dir before the /usr/share/ikiwiki one, and tried it again, and now it works... sorry.

Thus done.