Obsidian updated its icon yesterday. Although there was no overall change in how the app functions, I thought it would be a pleasant change to jump on the trend and share some of the top ways to improve how the app looks.
Of course, changing Obsidian’s appearance doesn’t contribute much to the functionality of the app. I’ll always advocate function over appearance, but it can improve your productivity if you have a visually pleasant an organised space to work in.
This article is going to share a mixture of plugins, tips and features for you to implement to change the appearance of the app. Pick the ones you like the look of and try them out!
Let’s get started.
There are several ways that I’ve come across to change how Obsidian appears for you. They are:
- Core settings
- Themes
- Plugins
- Snippets
They all bring different aspects of customisation to the app. You don’t have to try them all out — I don’t use snippets at the moment — but I’m going to cover them all here for the sake of completeness.
Core settings
Core settings are for the basic appearance changes that you can make to Obsidian.
Found in the ‘Appearance’ tab of the app settings, here you can change things like base colour scheme (light/dark) as well as accent colour. You can find font options here too as well as some customisation around tabs, menus and frames.
This settings tab is also where you manage your installed themes and snippets, which I’ll come to later in the article.
I make a couple of changes to the default settings in this tab:
- Change the font to Work Sans for interface and text, and JetBrains Mono
- I make the font size slightly smaller than default, as well as the zoom level of the app
A lot of the visual preferences I describe in this app don’t make any difference to productivity, so you can choose the settings that look the most pleasing to you, rather than copying me. I’m just giving examples for the sake of demonstrating what’s possible.
There are some appearance settings and plugins that will improve your productivity if you use them correctly, but I’ll point out which ones they are individually when we reach them in the article.
Themes
Themes are the most varied level of customisation available when customising Obsidian. They can change any visual aspect of the app, from colours and fonts to more complex settings, such as stacked tab width and table appearance.
Since the release of Obsidian 1.0, which brought an overhaul of the app’s UI, I’ve preferred less invasive themes, because most of the defaults are close to my desired appearance. Here are some themes that I have used recently:
- Minimal by kepano
- Shimmering Focus by pseudometa
- Anuppuccin by Anubis
These are all fully customisable themes through the Style Settings plugin (more on this later), but they provide a nice clean interface through which to interact with Obsidian.
Minimal is the most downloaded community theme and for good reason. It’s minimal (of course), clean and very customisable. It has little to no visual bugs when used with plugins, which is something that I’ve had trouble with when using some other themes. I don’t know CSS, so I want something that works well with all my plugins out of the box, and Minimal fits the bill.
This is my theme of choice in Obsidian at the moment, and with kepano recently becoming the CEO of Obsidian, it’s likely that this theme will continue to be well-integrated with the app. It also has its own plugin that serves to add more options to how the theme looks.
Shimmering Focus brings more of a visual overhaul to base Obsidian. With custom fonts and appearance tweaks, this theme has been written with power users in mind. It has removed lots of unnecessary visual features, relying on you being able to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate the Obsidian interface.
This was my favourite theme before the Obsidian UI update, because of how it brought a fresh look to the app, without clutter in the interface. Recently, however, I’ve fallen out of love with it in favour of themes that are simpler. This doesn’t change the fact that it’s a fantastic choice of theme that many people actively use.
I didn’t know about the Anuppuccin theme before they announced it as the winner of the theme category of the 2022 Gems of the Year, but I wish I did because it’s an excellent theme for Obsidian.
Similar to Minimal, this theme doesn’t change base Obsidian much when first installed, but it has a lot of customisable settings and a few features that are unique. This includes custom background images and an option to change the colour of the frame of the app.
You can also extend Anuppuccin with CSS snippets — there’s one that adds some more colour schemes and one that adds rainbow colours to the folders in your sidebar. More detail about snippets later, but now let’s talk about plugins…
Plugins
There are lots of plugins that change the appearance of Obsidian for the better. Here are the ones that I currently use in my vault:
- Style Settings
- Hider
- Supercharged Links
Style Settings is a must-have plugin if you want to customise your Obsidian theme to its full potential. The plugin adds the ability to change lots of different aspects of your theme. This is why it’s a good idea to choose a theme to apply to Obsidian — the base interface doesn’t offer any customisation beyond what’s in the base Appearance settings tab.
It’s important to choose the theme wisely too because the themes will offer different amounts of customisation from within Style Settings. This is one reason I recommended the three themes earlier — they offer very extensive options for customising how the theme looks, so you can build your ideal workspace.
Hider is a plugin developed by kepano that simply offers the ability to hide different UI elements, such as tab bar, ribbon, scroll bars and status bar. I’m quite a keyboard-focused Obsidian user, so I hide a lot of the interface features because I can access them with shortcuts.
This is a great plugin for reducing clutter and allowing you to focus on your writing and creating within the app. Less is more.
The plugin Supercharged Links was made to spice up the links between your notes. It allows you to define visual features of links dependent upon the metadata of the note you are linking to.
I use this in my vault to show when links are to atomic notes that I contain in the Zettelkasten section of my vault (they are green with an evergreen tree emoji). I also have custom links for lecture notes, as well as notes from my Readwise import defining whether the source is a book, article or podcast.
Addition of these visual features improves my productivity by creating links that tell me more about the linked note in question than just its title. This means that I can gain a better idea of the context of my notes without having to follow all the links within them.
Snippets
If themes and plugins aren’t enough for you, there’s also the option to customise Obsidian with CSS snippets. These are short pieces of code that can alter any of the features of the interface in the app.
There aren’t many snippets that I use and I don’t create my own because I don’t know how to write CSS, but they’re popular for those who want to customise Obsidian to the max.
There’s a GitHub repository that contains some popular CSS snippets for Obsidian. Unfortunately, I can’t give much more information than this because I don’t use snippets in my vault. They’re a very powerful way to customise the appearance of Obsidian, however, so check them out if you’re considering more personalisation, or you want to get into theme development.
The main reason to customise your vault’s appearance is simply to make it a pleasant place to work in. You should do some experimentation with plugin settings to decide what you prefer, because it’s always better to build your own system based on your own preferences rather than someone else’s.
I hope this article helps you to take the visual elements of your Obsidian vault to the next level — thanks for reading!