Obsidian Theme Reference

Foreword

Hi, I am currently working on an Obsidian Theme Reference. It is a site with information about all current community themes. It hopes to be useful for those looking to try out new Obsidian themes but will not go into too much detail for each theme. There will be tagging and reference criteria to help you find your dream theme.

Currently, the reference document is very WIP. Suggestions, contributions and other feedback are welcome.

Contributions

Contributions are welcome. Just open an issue, GitHub Discussion via the site directly or a Pull Request at the repository.

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What about if this reference list were in some MD file format and available through a Git repository? You know, that you can easily see it in Obsidian and test/try/see themes there :slight_smile:

On the other hand - great work!

Cheers, Marko :nerd_face:

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Perhaps I could do that but that would tempt me to automate the whole process which removes the whole personal touch of the scoring system. I might consider it.

Thanks for the suggestion.

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Respect! :metal:

Cheers, Marko :nerd_face:

Hello! Would just like to let you know I want to contribute to this once I am done with the semester.

I think I will also reference this when I make my own thread about revamping the theme and plugin display page in the app itself.

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sure, contributions are greatly appreciated.

P.S. how’s the velocity code going?

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I’ll try to help! :grinning:

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Now that I think about it, pushing the code as markdown files to a static site generator would be a great idea.

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quick update, I am in the process of moving the Google Document content to a GitHub Pages site.

This gives me the option to customise the theme reference site while not giving up the personal touch of the scoring system. Coupled other potential improvements like:

  • better search
  • tagging
  • syntax highlighting
  • comments via Giscus
  • ability to git clone the entire site’s source code to view it within Obsidian

The entry barrier to contributing is slightly higher though for simple enough typos feedback using comments is good enough.

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Oh right, I forgot to link the site and GitHub repository here.

GitHub repository:
https://github.com/bladeacer/ObsiThemeRef

Site:
https://bladeacer.github.io/ObsiThemeRef/

Due to the scoring format, it’s not sorted correctly. As you can see, 19.5 and 15.5 should be above 19 and 15. Try to change before the table gets too big :slight_smile:

Otherwise - great!

Cheers, Marko :nerd_face:

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Thanks for the feedback. The problem seems to be that . come before numbers in the ASCII table. I have fixed the issue.

Update

Hello blade! I have a bit of free time now and can share some of my thoughts.

First of all, I have to thank you and commend your effort. Theme devs and Obsidian theming in general have always been seen as second-fiddle to plugin development, so it is nice to see that someone cares enough to create a reference like this. It puts people in the spotlight and makes it apparent that a lot of thought and criteria go into making even just a decent, good (and not great) theme.

Concerns about the scoring model

however I have to mention that a reference should generally be just that - a reference, totally impartial and factual in nature. It is for this reason I dislike the stats-based approach of the plugin statistics project and its scoring system.

I understand the rationale behind a scoring system, but in my opinion, it serves to reduce a dev’s work into mere numbers to be crunched and considered. This is especially concerning when the same approach is applied to theming - something which is inherently much more subjective in nature.

A theme cannot be reduced to a set of scores much as the life of a human being cannot be described only through their civilian records and personal information.

Tweaks and alternatives

What we can do instead is provide a system of unbiased, factual descriptors or ‘tags’ on a theme-by-theme basis.

What do I mean by this? Well, for example - instead of assigning score values to things like dark/light mode support, aesthetic quality and theme age, just leave those categories as is and set them as ‘tags’ for the purposes of grouping. Let those reading the reference decide for themselves how important a theme’s accessibility is or how pretty it is in their opinion.

Additionally, a reference should describe the overall style and character of a theme to at least some decent extent. For example, you could say that Primary is warm with beige tones and tricolor accents, but has tactility through button presses. Or Flexcyon is cool and techy with a retro vibe and clear TUI influences. This helps people gauge the nature of a theme even in the absence of images (though images should ideally be included!)

(bonus) My own wishes/plans

A community thrives on personal interactions and the sharing of passion and interest around a common topic. Both the plugin and theme dev communities of Obsidian have fallen away from what they were when the app was younger and the community more tightly-knit. We now have a situation where AI and tech-bro grifters take up a lot of noise in the plugin space, and cheap, trendy AnuPpuccin/Border setups dominate the notes-showcase in the discord. The way themes are presented in the store promotes the continuing dominance of a few themes at the expense of everything else.

The community is fragmented; Obsidian has become just a tool to mess around with, fine tune and optimize, not a vision of a environment that works for you and can become an expression of art itself. There was a time in the wild west of theme development where people really were experimenting and pushing the boundaries of Obsidian’s CSS - where themes like Sanctum, Yin and Yang, Prism, ITS and SF were born. I long for a return to such days, no matter how embellished or exaggerated my perception may be compared to the reality.

Back then there was also a person who regularly maintained updates on the status and happenings within the Obsidian community. Their project was known as the Obsidian Roundup, if I remember correctly.

I want to start a blog, maybe just my own or several of us together, where we can post and talk about theme development and gush about the design decisions of some of our favorite themes and snippets. A place where love for theme development can truly blossom.

Final notes

Once again I’d like to thank you for taking the initiative to do this. I hope you heed my advice and take a more neutral approach centered around description and not evaluation. As for what you asked about Velocity’s development - let’s just say that something big, a total overhaul is in the works.

I will link back to this long post when I make my own separate thread about redesigning the theme store page and the way it arranges themes.

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“I understand the rationale behind a scoring system, but in my opinion, it serves to reduce a dev’s work into mere numbers to be crunched and considered. This is especially concerning when the same approach is applied to theming - something which is inherently much more subjective in nature.”

Unfortunately I do not have a better way of measuring certain aspects of a theme, or being able to credibly say one theme is objectively better than the other. As much as themes are subjective, the scoring system is more of a generalisation of how much effort went into a theme. I do intend to put a huge disclaimer on the scoring system, but not to remove it as a measurable metric is something I wish to have. I wish to make it more of a second consideration, rather than have it take centre stage. I will have to tweak the existing scoring system, or remove it altogether.
And yes, the scoring system in its current state is quite bad IMO.

“Additionally, a reference should describe the overall style and character of a theme to at least some decent extent.”

This becomes inconvenient when a theme’s author itself provides no clear indication of its own style and character, which leaves it up to subjective interpretation.

“What we can do instead is provide a system of unbiased, factual descriptors or ‘tags’ on a theme-by-theme basis.”

The trouble then is deciding what constitutes aspects of a theme worth tagging. However, I think it is a good idea and will look to add tags. Again, this is subjective.

Thanks for taking the time to write your post. :slight_smile:

P.S. Can I reach out to you on Discord about this?

I have taken into consideration your suggestions, and have implemented them @Floodlight.

Feel free to DM me on discord! I am glad you took my suggestions, and if you have any further plans or ideas for the theme reference, I’d love to hear about them. Maybe we can also figure out a way to bring this project to more people’s attention :slightly_smiling_face:

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About 10% of all the themes in the community store. There are plenty of hidden gems :slightly_smiling_face:

update: the count is around 50 themes added now
I also fixed the instructions for cloning the site locally and viewing it within Obsidian.