I’d like to recommend some Obsidian themes to you.
These are the themes I’ve used the most over the past two and a half years—battle-tested themes that have proven themselves in practice.
Overview
Let me start with the conclusion. Since I began using git in 2024, here are the top 5 themes by total usage time:
- AnuPpuccin: 61 days (6.7%)
- Composer: 47.2 days (5.2%)
- Shimmering Focus: 45.1 days (5.0%)
- Dawn: 41.3 days (4.5%)
- Iridium: 38.2 days (4.2%)
The number of days represents how long I used each theme in total.
Among these, AnuPpuccin and Shimmering Focus are more decorative themes—the latter especially has a quite distinctive style. The other three lean toward the plain and practical: well-designed without being overly flashy, making them well-suited for long-term use.
Also, although the screenshots are all light themes, I actually switch back and forth between light and dark mode, and some of these themes saw noticeably more use in dark mode. For the sake of consistency (and to make screenshotting easier), I used light mode screenshots throughout.
Note: For the former, I downloaded an “extended color scheme” CSS and switched to a palette I personally prefer using the Style Settings plugin; for the latter, I even applied a whole stack of CSS snippet patches to match my own preferences. Both are customized.
Aside from the full usage period (backed by git records), to give some newer themes a fair shake, I also separately tallied the top 5 most-used themes within 2026:
- Iridium: 28.1 days (14.5%)
- Brutal Gum: 21.7 days (11.2%)
- Underwater: 16.2 days (8.4%)
- Composer: 13.4 days (6.9%)
- Baseline: 12.7 days (6.5%)
Disclosure: Brutal Gum is a Gumroad-style theme I developed myself, and I need to test it, so its ranking is naturally inflated.
If you exclude it, then Cupertino—made by the same developer as Baseline—would enter the top five.
The Full Ranking
I had Codex generate two charts showing the top 20 themes for the all-time period and within the current year, for your reference.
Beyond total days used (the blue bar chart), I added a few extra statistical dimensions:
- Longest consecutive streak (yellow line): how long I used it continuously—the higher, the more durable it is
- Number of uses (green text): how many times I switched to this theme in total
- Average duration per use (purple dot): how long I used it after each switch
Epilogue, or a Prologue?
I started making Git backups of my vault in January 2024.
Then, a couple of days ago, it suddenly hit me—the theme I use is stored in the appearance.json file. In theory, I only needed to look at the change history of this file to obtain a detailed set of statistics: when I used which theme, and how long I used each one.
If I wanted to recommend themes to others—what could be more convincing than “the themes I actually used the longest”?
Hence, this post.
Preemptive disclaimer: I completely understand that themes aren’t that important to some users, and even the default theme is more than enough for many people. Personally, I get bored easily and constantly try out new themes, and my own preferences have their limitations—so it’s entirely possible you won’t like any of the themes above. Feel free to share themes you think are better!