Obsidian Guide #1. Appearances and Themes
One of Obsidian's strengths is how customizable it is (which can also be a weakness, if you're indecisive like me ROFL). Obsidian's community is resplendent with theme-makers making things that completely change the feel of the program. So, if you're looking to make this program yours, here's the way to do it.
Go to your vault's settings. You can access it by pushing the gear button at the bottom left corner of the program, to the right of the vault's name.
2. Go to the appearance tab. This is fourth option on the left-hand side of the menu screen.
3. This will bring you to a screen with a load of options. On this screen, you can change the accent color (that is, the purple highlight and occasional buttons), as well as the fonts, font-spacing, and a few interface changes such as show/hiding the ribbon, the title of file names and the zoom level of the program. You can fiddle around with these if you'd like, but the real bread and butter comes from the CSS Snippets (found at the bottom of this panel) and the Themes. Let's focus on the themes for now. Click the button that says "manage" under the themes header. This should be the third option down, right after the accent color selection.
4. This will bring you here:
This is easiest way to find themes created by the community. All of them have to be approved by Obsidian staff to show here. There are two ways to change how you browse here.
1. The filter button - this only filters out themes by title, so it's helpful if you're looking for something specific, but as you can see, most themes have names that aren't exactly descriptive of their features. So, I mostly just scroll.
2. The Sort button - This lets you change the order in which you see themes. You can sort by alphabetically, most recently released, and most downloaded.
Scroll until you find one that seems interesting! When you do, click the theme's icon, which will open it's full description. Then you just need to hit "Install and Use" right underneath the meta information for the theme.
Once you hit install, it should automatically turn on! If you don't wind up liking it, you can either repeat the process above and find another theme to try (freshly installed themes will be automatically swapped to over the previous theme) OR go back to the theme's page through the theme manager and hit uninstall, which either is replacing the install and use button if it's the active theme or is to the right of the "Use This Theme" button (which has replaced the "Install and Use" one).
Now, you may get to your theme and go "huh, that's all? I thought it looked much cooler in the preview." Well my dear friend, that is because the theme-developers are likely counting on you having a certain plug-in installed, which opens up the world of customization for themes.
This plug-in is called "Style Settings" and it can be found under the community plug-ins. This is the last option before the core-plugin choices in the options menu. When you click it, you might get a screen that says that you are currently in restricted mode. It gives some details about how plug-ins are monitored. I haven't heard of this failing *yet* but as they say, never say never. There's a risk with anything you grab from the internet.
If you want to proceed, hit turn on community plug-ins. At any point, you can turn them off and re-enter restricted mode on this screen. Now, you just want to hit the browse button, which is just below the "turn on and reload" (restricted mode) button. You'll come upon a screen very similar to the themes browser. From here, you just want to type in "Style Settings" in the filter bar, click the plug-in that says Style Settings, and then click Install. Once it has installed, you then need to manually enable it (unlike themes, which are enabled upon installation)
There will now be a third option on the main settings page (where we went to after step two.) It should look something like this now:
Clicking into Style Settings, you should hopefully see some further customization options under the theme you have installed. You might need to click the themes name in this page to get it to open. Not all themes have Style Settings and not all themes have the *same* Style Settings, but it's handy to have in mind! Not all themes denote that they have Style Settings available, so it's nice to just double check after installation so you can get the peak experience.
You are now free to go fourth and style up your Obsidian. I haven't touched on css-snippets, because they're slightly (maybe like 0.5%) more involved if you are using someone else's, but that will come in the future.
If you still can't find any theme that fits your liking out of the current 366~ then you can try your hand at creating your own theme! Obsidian has released some documentation to aid in theme creation, which is a great jumping off point!
