How To Use Obsidian: Finding Your Best Theme

let's demystify themes if you've ever spent hours trying to get it looking just right but something goes wrong or everything was fine for months if not a year and then something goes sideways on you and you it takes forever to figure this out hopefully I want to demystify themes and help you get obsidian looking how you want it to look uh without having to be a scholar in computer science or H getting your hands too dirty with coding so I want to go through how to change themes and some of the best themes that I've run across and then explain why they have some personality quirks that can be really frustrating if you don't understand what's going on behind the scenes and I want to do this in a non-technical way so that somebody like me an artist uh business owner can wrap your head around it quickly without having to get a degree in computer science like I said so this is for you if you want to get your obsidian dialed in and enjoy looking at something that you probably use all day every day so that's why I'm making this video for you so stick around to the end and I will point you in the direction of some more resources that you might be able to make use of but for now uh let's jump in back into the YouTube Vault we go and just like all my previous videos this is a completely stock theme this is basically how it comes and now we're really going to monkey with it but also in case you haven't seen any of my other videos I just want to start off by showing you what you can do just from this View without really doing anything else which I didn't know about for a really long time and if we're talking about themes and making it look like how we want it to look because we're going to be looking at it so much you can drag and drop different modules uh any anywhere that you want really uh you can make them bigger you can make them share the same space and you can toggle between them and you can have it entire documents open here I like to keep bookmarks here and maybe the file directory there but really bookmarks is what I look at the most on the side panel over here but let's talk about changing the look of your theme and the easiest way to do that is to go look at what themes are available and in order to do that you go to settings and then go to appearance and here's where you can go down the rabbit hole this can eat up so much of your time and hopefully I'm going to save you hours of your life by going through all this but basically the base color scheme you've got dark light or if you're one of those peculiar humans that uses a time sensitive operating environment uh that is light during the day and then turns to dark mode when the Sun goes down you can say adapt to system so if you change your system to be light obsidian will turn light as well or if you go to the dark side obsidian will go to the dark side but for me I like to keep it as dark and the accent color is B basically anywhere you see this purple show up that's it I in my own personal thing I really like this kind of toxic yellow I don't know why maybe it was the GI Joe's I grew up with and the and the toxic vipers from the the Cobra commanders troops I I don't know but I really like this combination and then the font this is where you can get wild with it as well as a graphic designer I've owned an agency that builds websites and promotional materials for entertainers and I've got so many fonts it's not even funny but if you have a favorite font you can install it to your system and then obsidian will use that font to use for its interface or for your writing or for code that's what these are and if you don't know where to go for that and you want to just spend a lot of time well you can go to Google fonts and then you can browse to your heart's content and you can use these these uh [Music] filters and then you can see what it's going to look like in the words that you are going to be using so you can talk about how big it is all languages or um if you want seraps on it which are those fancy dads or you don't want those fancy doodads that you can you can filter by all of that and then you can go through and then get font and you can download the whole family install that font and then it'll be uh there for obsidian to use so basically your interface font that's all the font that we're looking at here all the text is in the interface font so if we wanted to make this Railway and click save so you saw the subtle change in all the words here in the interface got a little bit cleaner that's what Railway does and you can get rid of it and then it goes right back to what it used to be or if you want to really notice the difference we can use a serif and voila now it looks all fancy for us so if you want to change the look of the words used in the interface that's what this interface font is all about then the text font is basically when you are making a new document font example here and we throw in bacon and we've got all of this uh outlined if you want to change this font this is what that is so the text font we can change this to Georgia and now we are fancy writer people right or if you are one of those monospace kind of folks so monospace font is used mainly for coding and Snippets of code and if you're a hardcore coding person you already know what monospace is but basically it's that kind of computer interface console looking terminal font but I actually like using monospace for my everyday writing and pro tip my absolute favorite monospace font is Berkeley mono in fact I actually bought Berkeley mono to use for the license that's how much I like it so basically you can make any kind of text whatever font you you want and you can drag and drop its hierarchy so basically obsidan will check hey is brookley mono installed can I use it yes I will use that if for some reason brookley mono is not there and it can't find it okay I will then go to Georgia if I can't find that then I will use the system default so this is how it handles text and and those kinds of fonts so now you can see all of our text here is Berkeley mono um which is what I prefer I I really like that font and then you can change font size if you if you don't read good you can't see all that well then you can make it as big as you like and reset that back down and you can also um enable quick font adjustment which you can I've got the trackpad so if I zoom in and out with the trackpad by pinching uh like this then it'll change the font size just like you were changing a picture size or you can hold down control and then scroll on your mouse and that'll change it so if you need to zoom in on something get a screenshot and then Zoom back out you can enable that however you like and then um show inline title um I'm not going to go through all of these options I would just highly recommend that you play with them uh but basically the ribbon menu is all this stuff over here on the left hand side and if you get used to using the command pallet and and keyboard shortcuts like I strongly suggest that you you do then you won't be using these very often so you can just delete most of these and clean up your workpace which is which is pretty great and there we go but now let's dive into the wonderful world of community made themes so we go to manage and you can choose only show me dark themes because I like dark themes I don't even bother with light themes so why do I want to even see themes that are only light I will never use those I don't even want to see them so let's look at dark themes only of which there are 208 themes and let's see how many are installed one which is the default which I I rolled with for a long time but basically you've got all these options and I I went with 80s neon for a while because I just I love the kind of vapor wave feel of this and the glowing text and headings it's pretty great and you can install it and all this stuff right but we're kind of skipping ahead of where I I wanted to be but it's already it's already begun which is the the frustration of understanding why these themes are the way that they are so let's just go ahead and dive into it because you know I I think that I should be able to go through and then okay obsidianite uh okay got it yep simple so I want to install it and there it is it made it made our whole obsidian Vault look a little different just not that much but the heading here the fil name uh there were some subtle tweaks done that aren't overt so maybe you like this kind of subtle thing but it's definitely a different theme which I like but it's kind of strange that the accent color that I do want is not showing up for this theme so I I don't like that that theme doesn't respect my choice of accent color so I don't like that theme so let's go find another one how about ooh Cybertron install and news okay yep cool aspects all right yep dark mode only bold words yep seems like it's pretty easy so we install it it is currently installing and I kind of I like how hideous this is it's uh a little difficult to read because there's not that much spacing around these modules but I'm not going to be in here all that often once I set it I'm going to forget it so it doesn't bother me all that much but as you can see it's very clear that this is the file that I'm working on and then this is the file so there's a very clear delineation uh with this tab that this tab goes with this file because the theme before was too subtle I couldn't see that this was this document and that tab was this document so I like a little bit more contrast between what that is then the sidebars kind of Fade Into Obscurity and we can hide those and now we've got the the whole thing working for us but as you might have noticed on the default the text filled the entire width like let's let's go back to those themes and now that we've installed a couple of themes if we want to switch between them we don't have to go to manage and then reinstall or anything like that just hit Escape we can quickly go through our installed things and let me see where that went because editor readable line length there we go um so if your text is full width like this and you didn't want it this way it could be that the theme you installed prefers wide width and what it did is it toggled readable line length off or on so I like to have it on so that it's here even if I don't have these sidebars open I prefer to have it clean and my text only here in the center so if your text does that that's why that's where to find it but back to uh installing the themes and why they misbehave sometimes all right so I I like this but I'm not a fan of the blue text all right so let's go back to manage and these are filtered in order of most downloaded and the default is number one because it comes that way and then the second most downloaded would be minimal and strangely enough that's the one that I use because I want a theme that has as little to do as possible I don't want it over engineered we'll get into why uh here in just a little bit but basically minimal is my faite one because it comes with built-in uh dark themes and light themes so basically instead of you having to figure out how to make all these changes it has kind of decided to make some of the defaults as presets that you can decide and then make small changes to those elements that you really care about and then make those changes easier to make so I I'll show you what that looks like here because we install and use it and there we go hey look at that it is respecting my my accent color so that's already nice and it has a pretty easy explainer on how to use it um but there are a lot of elements that I don't ever even use like Focus mode with image grid and image width I don't even play with that I use a very very minimal um setup of minimal but as you can see here's an important consideration minimal includes support for dozens of popular plugins like calendar combine data view excal draw all that stuff so let's take a minute to talk about that and in order to do that we've got to go back back to the late '90s when I was in high school and I learned about this thing called HTML and how it is used to write uh web pages and and websites and back then you had to hardcode every page and if you wanted your logo in the corner you put your logo in every corner and then if you wanted to change the logo you would have to go into every page and change it and that is the challenge of having a static website it's faster because it just loads the HTML and the the image and boom you're done however it's very frustrating because when you start getting 20 50 100 200 pages on a website and you have to go in and change the image on every single one of those it it gets to be very frustrating well Along Came programs like Dreamweaver that would do all that hard code for you all at once so it's using a computer to do that repetition so that you don't need to and that was a lot better but it's still not great and then Along Comes A content management system like WordPress and instead of using static HTML web pages it's now using Dynamic languages like PHP to use a framework and then all the data lives in the database and then the front end goes and asks for the elements that it needs and then puts it there when you ask for that web page so now your logo lives on the database one place and then the web page asks for it and it gets put there dynamically so then all you have to do is change the logo in the database and now every page on your website that might need that logo is updated because it is dynamically getting it and rendering it where it needs to go so that was a massive Improvement and then somebody gets the bright idea of hey let's do that for the look of a website so we're not even going to hard code that this heading will be read we will now just say all headings are H1 kind of heading of a particular class and we can call it something like fancy heading or whatever whatever you want to call it so now every heading that has fancy as part of its its identity of what it is now there's another document that defines how all the elements of your website should look and that is called a cascading stylesheet so now all of your elements your images and your photos and all that kind of stuff lives on a database and then all the information about how the text should look lives in this CSS and now the front-end framework is putting all that together to render how your website should look in real time okay what does any of that have to do with obsidian uh basically everything because obsidian is a loose framework that presents your or markdown files to you in the way that you want them to look so that's really what these themes are they're kind of like CSS for your thin wrapper of obsidian that is presenting your information to you the way that you want to see it so since obsidian is kind of an open-source project anybody can build on it and when they're building they can build whatever they want their way and they don't have to take into account how everybody else is building what they're building so that's why this sentence is so crucial minimal includes support for dozens of popular plugins like calendar kbon data View outliner excal that kind of thing because the creators of calendar May not talk to the creators of excal dra so when you pick a theme that theme also has to take into account how calendar has decided to style what it does and what its classes are called because maybe their headings aren't called Fancy they're called time Bal or whatever it could be anything now the real challenge happens when calendar calls this heading this thing and then outliner has that same term for styling their own thing but it's different so now you've got two of the same element in your database but two plugins are calling it different things I I didn't know that those uh reactions were still heed I don't know how to turn that off all right anyway so now you've got two plugins competing over the same name space the same classes calling it the same stuff and obsidian may not know who to listen to and who that shouldn't listen to or obsidian does just fine but your theme may not know who to listen to or the plug-in tries to wrestle control out of the theme's hands into its hands because it's a very particular kind of layout and it just won't work any other way so that's why you sometimes will find that your tee does not play well with your favorite plugins it's because it's an open- source project and developers don't have to they don't need to talk to each other to get their thing out the door and that's why sometimes your theme will glitch out and just won't look right okay so that's a long way to say that this is really cool that minimal goes the extra distance to try to accommodate the most popular plugins in order for you to have a unified visual aesthetic to make sure that minimal theme looks the same no matter what plugins you're using no matter how you're using your database okay so that's that's what this is all of all that I just went over uh is what they're trying to get across in one s sentence all right so now instead of plugging it in installing it and going you could just use it the way that you you saw but this installation is really important because it says to install the theme open settings appearance click manage and use minimal so we already did that scrolling back up uh we did that by installing and enabling so we've already done step one so we've already done step one by the time that we scrolled down here it's to install the companion plugin wait wait a minute okay so now not only do I need to install a theme this theme now needs a whole ass plugin in order for me to use the theme which was kind of janky at first in in my head I get it now but also I can appreciate that before you have your head wrapped around it it doesn't make any sense so let's do it the idea is that we are looking for minimal theme settings plugin so I'm going to hit command C to copy that we've installed minimal so that's cool it's enabled but now we need to go to community plugins then we have to browse Community plugins then we have to search for minimal theme settings and it looks like it is installed I might have left it installed from when I was kind of pre-walking through this but basically you install it like any other plugin and you install you enable it and then you can go to the options and and now what they're doing is giving you push button control over a lot of CSS on the back end so instead of you having to know a lot of code and know where to put the code and all that stuff the creators of minimal were like you know what we like code I know that you Jonathan really like buttons so we're going to make a whole plugin that is going to be between the theme and what you like so now you can go through and choose a whole bunch of buttons to push and you can make it look however you want so that's really neat however it does introduce extra layers of complexity because if you like obsidian for how simple it is the more of these plugins you using the more dependent you are on them the more brittle your database is going to be because there are now more things that have to talk to each other and have to work together in order to work properly so for every one of these that you're adding in yes it looks better but it's also going to be more frustrating in 6 months when something updates and now there's a conflict when there hasn't been one and just out of the blue it just doesn't work so your mileage may vary this may not bother you at all I do want it to be on your radar so that you can remember this moment a year later when something goes janky you're like oh right it was that dependent plug-in that I had to install for my theme to work the way that I got it to work okay I get it I know where to look because it doesn't really like it doesn't make sense in my head that in order to fix my theme I have to go to my plugins because plugins to me extend obsidian functionality not change how it looks but you you get what I'm saying okay so now there are pre-built extra themes within the minimal theme it's kind of like yo dog I heard that you like themes we put extra themes in your theme and if you've got light mode color scheme you can uh choose any of these light modes and then background contrast if you want high or low and then basically the same flavor but for dark mode so you can go through and choose all of these different things I love how hideous this one is I can't use it because the interface is just so goofy like look the there's no clear separation I kind of like a Bento Box uh uh interface so that I know what is this and what's that so I I can't I can't use this eink version uh I typically like Dracula flavored themes but you can go through and pick whichever whichever dark mode you like best and you can I like I like Rosé Pine that that's kind of cool and then uh you can do low contrast where it's all kind of middle gray or true black where it's like OLED display mimicking but I like default a little bit extra contrast and then you can tweak a lot more of the interface elements here so colorful headings if you're using a whole bunch of different headings you can see that they're all different colors so that's that's what that is so there are all sorts of things that you can play with inside the minim Minal theme so you can turn on the image grids I don't because I use the active preview I don't like switching between editing and then reading mode I just use active preview and at least last time that I tried it out the image grids kind of thing just didn't work and if you embed a lot of iframes for example if you watch a lot of YouTube hello and you want to save this for later and you cop the iframe Ed code and paste that into your note you can show like all right should it be wide maximum or 100% Paine width and and this is changing how obsidian handles iframe width back again in the CSS but here they're just giving you these drop downs which is really cool I like this a lot so you can Define that for tables and images and iframes and all that kind of stuff then you can get even more granular with the text and fonts and that kind of thing so that's the the plugin for minimal and then you get it dialed in and there you go this is the the thing so that's an overview of that one I want to show you another theme that does this but even more so and there's a hint of it right here which is the Capuchin I don't know why it's called that um but this theme is kind of a call back to we go to here manage let's dark themes only Anin here we go install and use and then scroll down so this this theme is so robust it comes with a preface and it's kind of a disclaimer and look please do note that I've made this theme for myself and it may not fit your use cases so I like that it starts with listen I'm not making this for you you can use it but this is for me it's for the way that I think so I s to this guy like I totally get it and then uh there's a whole drop down for installation uh if you like working in the terminal and you want to do it that way well here are the terminal commands for it but just like minimal had its own built-in themes so does this and it also has extended color schemes and layouts and rainbow folders this helps you over here here kind of behind this over here you can see that um they're all kind of the same color so rainbow folders add colors to help you differentiate one folder from another which is kind of cool then you can go in Full Tilt and change what those colors are so if you don't like a rainbow Motif you can do muted pastel like whatever you want you could do bright obnoxious colors you can make it your own which is really neat and then just uh you can change the call outs and basically every element you can change but this is really nerdy and awesome because um if you use checkboxes often which I do for packing lists any time I go on a trip I have a packing list template that I drop in and basically you can have empty checkbox you can have checkbox filled in that's it this guy just went wild with it and created a whole I I think it was him maybe not but basically there are even more things that you can use in these checkboxes which is kind of cool so let's copy all this and then see what happens when we paste it in right here okay it it doesn't it doesn't respect it okay anyway so now just like minimal had its own U plugin for minimal there's a style settings plugin that is uh not specific to anuchin but is useful so let's go to appearance or Cor Community plugins browse style settings install this enable it then options now you can open Anup pin's graphic user interface options to change the theme look from inside the plugin so it's the same kind of idea but it's all here done for you so you can change the dark themes and uh frappe I like mocha old let me try mocha new all right cool Dark theme accent uh you can change it to Pink move so these are all very subtle understated things but Rose waterer I want want to change what rose water is so color overrides down here in dark mode Let's call this that super obnoxious yellow and click save and there we go it's called Rose waterer but but it's That Hideous yellow and now we've got That Hideous yellow back haha which is awesome and now you can see that all these colors uh now rosew water is toxic green which is fantastic so you can change all of these colors for the dark mode and the light mode as well so you can you can do all that stuff that you want and then Integrations you can change the look of your combon cards you can hide the menus so now you've got your theme has a plugin that's giving you control over the visual elements of other plugins so it's kind of multiple layers of inception going on but it's really powerful it's incredible you can dial it in exactly how you want it but if you didn't know that that's what this is and this is how to set it up it's very frustrating very challenging to figure out so now you know how how it all thinks and why and how to get this going now you can change uh Source editor font live preview editor font can type in the family there and it's all done and the headings enable custom heading colors you like sure instead of having those colors from minimal you can enable your own custom colors so now you could have custom font for each heading that you want you could have H1 be Railway you could have H2 be Berkeley mono you could have um H3 be something else it's wild how specific you can get and there is a question of should you spend that much time on your theme and I I I don't mind it me I I tend to get it dialed in how I like it and then leave it that way so I use this all the time I'm looking at it I want to be able to understand what I'm looking at so I like getting a lot of the major features the way that I like it and then leave it alone and to me that is different than spending a lot of time on say a dashboard um that I wind up not using all that much and uh we'll get into that at the at near the end of this video but basically I think it's time well spent getting your theme dialed in how you like it and that's it so then you could also um change your canvas from if you like doing mind mapping and and that kind of thing I've got a whole video about canvas you can change how canvas looks or PDF viewer you can uh look there's so much so much that you can do and if you like it you can support the project buy them a a cup of coffee and that would be fantastic so this is what I really wanted to show you I can't forget about this enable custom checkbox I do want to enable that because that is the setting that's hidden in here that enables you to do all these cool things I hope that will be able to see here yeah okay so now we can say all right that's checked off with the the X there and then and if it's important we can put an exclamation point in there and then if it's rescheduled you can do that so now there are a lot of other ways to use the checkboxes instead of is it done or not now it can be a kind of a visual element with all these different things so there are all these options speech bubble six let's see what that one looks like so if you're a fan of uh I guess my my computer doesn't have that font or whatever it is idea let's see what that looks like all right light bulb neat so this just a really neat thing that you can enable uh with a variety of themes and there you go but as I was saying um when it all comes down to it I don't spend a lot of time in in my theme editing I go to appearance I go to minimal and then I go to the minimal theme settings and then I pick Rosé Pine and this is pretty much how how it looks and I believe that the setting plugin from the community style setting enables you to do a lot of those extra checkbox things there it's somewhere in here as well so that's another element is that there are multiple places where you can make the same change so it's kind of like all right where where is it hidden which is why I don't really like doing this a lot because takes forever takes forever to find where this is so minimal theme settings colorful window frame no but what is that okay I kind of like that so now all these elements are that toxic yellow that's kind of cool and then underline links image grid map width yeah it's in there somewhere but now might be able to there we go so minimal in some somewhere for some reason the way that it works with my computer as you noticed Anin this slash didn't work right because it should show it in progress instead of that it's done or not now with the slash that shows it halfway done or I can show that it's been sent to somebody else so yeah there there's still all these ways to to use these so that's why I use minimal accent color respector I tend to get rid of a lot of the visual elements and then I build out a workspace and I'll talk to you about that in just a little bit but this is what I wanted to show you with themes I know this is a lot but hopefully it can be the only one that you need to spend your time on to understand uh what's going on behind the scenes why your plugins sometimes can be fine for months but then suddenly have some kind of conflict between your theme and why there's a plugin and Snippets and all the stuff like that that's it just pick something simple make the major changes that you like and then get back into using this incredible program to create cool stuff that you put out into the world so that's it for this I want to get back to the good camera to talk to you about the last minute details I wasn't kidding right that was a lot to go over and hopefully you got something useful out of it if you did uh give this video a thumbs up that will tell YouTube that more people like you need to check this out and also it to let me know that this is the kind of thing you'd like to see me make more of and if you have any questions or ideas of other videos about obsidian that I haven't made already put them in the comments I read every single comment I don't have an assistant that does that so if you leave something I'm going to see it so that's the best place to drop any ideas or questions you have about uh how you can get something done using one of the best programs on planet Earth and since you're spending so much time getting your theme dialed in just right I also want to save you a lot of time from building something that you're not going to use and that is a dashboard so if you use dashboards or you've heard of it and you've been thinking about building one or you've never heard of a dashboard in the first place I think this uh this video that I'm about to put up here will be the best one for you to watch because I make a strong case for why dashboards aren't worth your time and what to do instead and it's something that's pretty simple but I don't see a lot of people talking about it so go ahead and check that one out and while you're doing that remember if you can change your mind you can change your life

Channel: Jonathan Pritchard

Views: 2,266

Keywords: mentalist, speaker, mc, conference, tradeshow, engagement, vip, business, success, confidence, motivation, inspiration, life hacking, mind hacking, Mentalism, second brain, sales, negotiation, influence, persuasion, life mastery, life mastery business, Zavant, theZAVANT, obsidian app, obsidian tutorial

Id: y6mE99s11fA

Length: 49min 24sec (2964 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024