Minimal

Winner of Obsidian's official Best Theme award ✨

Minimal is an Obsidian interface replacement meticulously designed to feel native on desktop, mobile and tablet. You can customize colors, fonts and more with the companion plugins Minimal Theme Settings and Hider.

Support development: @kepano on Twitter or Buy me a coffee

About Minimal

• Goals
• Screenshots
• Features
• Installation
• Companion plugins
• Color schemes
• Plugin support
• Helper classes
• Hotkeys
• Contributing
• Developers
• Disclaimer

Goals

• Simplify the Obsidian UI for a more focused editing experience
• Follow native interface guidelines for MacOS, iOS and iPadOS
• Make it easy to customize colors, fonts, and display features
• Add advanced layout options for data-rich notes, such as card view, image grids, and full-width tables

Screenshots

Background styles include low contrast, high contrast, and a true black option ideal for OLED devices

Helper classes for tables and card layouts allow you to create powerful workflows

Combining focus mode with image grid and image width options allows you to immerse yourself in visual projects

Minimal includes support for dozens of popular plugins like Calendar, Kanban, Dataview, Outliner, Excalidraw, Sliding Panes, and more

Every screen in the Obsidian app has been revised to create a cohesive experience, including settings, plugin browser, sync, publish, and file recovery

Features

The following features can be accessed using Minimal Theme Settings plugin or Style Settings plugin (see companion plugins instructions below)

• Background styles for light and dark mode, including true black ideal for OLED devices
• Focus mode — hides everything but the text when sidebars are collapsed
• Custom icons
• Fancy cursor — uses accent color for the cursor
• Hide sidebar borders
• Trim filenames
• Cursor options
• Click and hold to expand images

Installation

• Open Obsidian Settings
• Go to Appearance and click Manage
• Under community themes search for Minimal and click Use

Have a question? Join the Minimal channel on the official Obsidian Discord.

Companion plugins

• Minimal Theme Settings plugin allows you to customize color schemes, fonts, hotkeys, and access the main feature toggles. This plugin is highly recommended for all users of Minimal.

• Hider plugin is recommended to hide Obsidian UI elements such as window frame, scrollbars, tooltips, etc. When using Hider to turn off the main toolbar (AKA app ribbon), it can be accessed by hovering over the bottom left edge of the window.

• Contextual Typography is required for advanced layout features such as image grids and block width options.

• Style Settings plugin allows you to create a custom color scheme. This plugin is optional.

Color schemes

Preset color schemes

Minimal comes loaded with color schemes that you can define separately for light and dark mode using the Minimal Theme Settings plugin, these include Dracula, Gruvbox, Nord, Notion, Solarized, and Things.

Custom color schemes

You can use the Style Settings plugin to customize your color scheme. To see your changes more easily, open Style Settings in a new pane by using the command palette (CMD + P by default). Using Style Settings you can customize Minimal's colors, font sizes, font styles, and many more details.

Plugin support

Most plugins work well with Minimal, but the following plugins have received special love and attention:

• Calendar
• Checklist
• Contextual Typography — required for image grids and layout control
• Dataview
• Dictionary
• Excalidraw
• Git
• Hider
• Kanban
• Outliner
• QuickAdd
• Sliding Panes — recommended spine width 36px
• Sortable — recommended for cards and tables

Helper filters and classes

Image filters

Image filters can be added to create the following effects. Use them by adding the filter name at the end of the image link, e.g. ![[image.jpeg#invert]]

CSS helper classes

CSS helper classes can be added on a per-file basis using the cssClasses YAML front matter key. These classes are composable, so you can include more than one to combine effects.

For example, use the following code at the top of your file to enable cards layout:

---
cssClasses: cards
---

Image grids

Turns consecutive images into columns. To make a new row, add an extra line break between images. Learn more.

Line width control for tables, images and iframes

Controls the width of elements by type. Learn more.

Cards

Using cards transforms Dataview tables into cards that can be sorted using the Sortable plugin. Compatible with table width classes. Note that cards must be present for the other classes to work.

Tables and Dataview

Controls the row and column styling for tables. Learn more.

Embeds and transclusions

Hotkeys

Hotkeys are only available when using the Minimal Theme Settings plugin.

Background and borders

• Switch between light and dark mode
• Cycle between light mode styles
• Cycle between dark mode styles
• Toggle sidebar borders

Layout control

• Toggle image grids
• Cycle between image width options
• Cycle between table width options
• Cycle between iframe width options

Misc

• Toggle focus mode
• Increase and decrease body font size

Contributing

If you would like add support for a plugin, or have found a bug you'd like to help fix, don't hesitate to open a pull request. Have a question? Join the Minimal channel on the official Obsidian Discord.

Plugin support

Plugin authors and developers can add support for Minimal theme by submitting a pull request. See the src/scss/plugins folder with examples of snippets for plugins that are currently supported.

Localization

Due to a limitation of Obsidian (see feature request), the Text labels feature, and some custom icons, are not supported in languages other than English. You can help by submitting a translation. To do so, create a snippet that matches the aria-label values to your language, with the two letter language code suffix added to the file name. Here is an example of the French translation.

Localization can also be added to Style Settings, see instructions.

Feel free to submit your contribution as a pull request, or send them to me directly.

Developers

Build instructions

Set up

sudo gem install sass
npm install -g grunt-cli
npm install

Define local path

To build directly into your Obsidian vault rename .env.example to .env and update OBSIDIAN_PATH to the local path of your Obsidian theme folder.

To run

npx grunt

This builds two files, the obsidian.css distribution file (for the community themes store) which is minified and also copied to your vault for live reload, and the Minimal.css file which is an unminified copy saved to the project root.

Distributing Minimal forks

Minimal is licensed under the MIT License which allows you to modify and redistribute the code, however you must preserve the copyright and license notice in your CSS file. This includes any code you may extract as standalone snippets.

If you would like to distribute a fork of Minimal please keep my Buy me a coffee link present in your Readme.

Minimal is frequently updated to stay current with the latest version of Obsidian. To make it easy to stay current with the latest improvements, I recommend using Github's fork feature so that you can merge the latest changes into your fork. If you have any questions don't hesitate to reach me in the Obsidian Discord group.

Disclaimer

This theme is provided as is, and is designed for my personal use of Obsidian on Mac OS. As such it is not thoroughly tested across all operating systems and use cases.

This theme modifies significant parts of the Obsidian interface, so it may break with future updates. It may also be incompatible with other bits of custom CSS you have.