The Empty-Tab Atmosphere
The black-hole scene that fills the Celestial Vault when no note is open: animated wallpaper, infalling stardust, constellations, a personalized greeting, action pills, and the per-launch intro.
Most note apps show you a blank white screen when nothing's open. The Celestial Vault doesn't.
When you have no file open, you see the empty-tab scene: an animated black hole wrapped in a gradient glow, a twinkling starfield, your personalized greeting, and two action pills that take you straight back to work. It's not just decoration. It's the moment of quiet before you start writing.
What's Happening Visually
The Black Hole
An animated black hole turns slowly at the center of the scene, ringed by a gradient glow with a soft shimmer rotating through it. Under the greeting, a gentle pool of your interface color keeps the text readable against the art.
Click it. The hole answers with a subtle gravitational thrum, and a beat later the greeting's brackets pulse outward. Purely cosmetic, entirely satisfying.
Infalling Stardust
Tiny grains of violet, gold, and lilac spiral inward along the accretion plane and vanish past the event horizon. Matter feeding the hole, falling with its spin.
The Starfield
A scattering of small twinkling stars overlays the scene, plus two little constellations joined by faint violet-to-gold lines. Each launch picks one of 4 curated sky configurations so you don't see the exact same composition every time.
The Greeting
Center of the screen, wrapped in wikilink brackets, in gradient text:
[[ Hello. <YourName>. ]]Your nickname (set during welcome or in settings) and your chosen greeting prefix.
The Action Pills
Beneath the greeting sit two clickable pills, written in the same visual language as the shortcut bar: a key chip plus a label.
⌘Pcommand panel ·⌘Ogo to file
Click a pill to fire the command, or just press the keys. The chips match your platform: Mac users see ⌘, Windows / Linux users see Ctrl. (On mobile there's no keyboard, so the pills stay hidden.)
The Launch Intro
Once per launch, the first empty tab you see opens with a short metamorphosis instead of the finished scene:
- A monochrome, Obsidian-purple black hole greets you while its violet halo breathes in.
- The Celestial star wakes at the edge of the scene and dives toward the hole.
- Impact: a flash and a shockwave along the disk plane, and the gradient black hole is born. The finished scene fades in around it.
The whole sequence lasts about five seconds, and you're never locked out: the rest of the workspace stays fully usable while it plays.
When it plays:
- Once per Obsidian launch, on the first visible empty tab. Closing tabs later in the same session shows the finished scene immediately.
- Only after onboarding completes, so it never competes with the welcome flow.
- It respects your settings: the Launch animation toggle, the master Animations switch (in Polish & atmosphere), and the Black hole layer all gate it.
Want to watch it again right now? Run "Replay intro animation" from the command palette (⌘P / Ctrl P), or press the Replay button in Settings → Celestial Plugin → Empty tab & launch animation.
When It Appears
The empty tab is visible whenever no file is open in the active pane. You'll see it:
- After welcome dismisses on first launch
- Whenever you close all tabs (
Cmd/Ctrl + Wrepeatedly) - After deleting the currently-open note
- At every launch, if you set Settings → Celestial Plugin → Journaling & hotkeys → "On startup, open" to Empty tab (Celestial scene)
It's a sanctuary state. A return-to-zero.
The First-Launch Nudge
Once-only golden shimmer.
On your very first launch, three seconds after welcome closes, a small notice fires in the top-right:
"Start your journal: press ⌥⇧D for today's daily note."
At the same time, the daily-note shortcut in the bottom-left status bar shimmers gold for ~6.5 seconds.
This is a one-shot nudge. After your first daily note exists (or after the shimmer naturally fades), it never appears again. It's just there to point first-time users at the most important shortcut they have.
Making It Yours
Every layer of the scene has its own switch:
Settings → Celestial Plugin → Empty tab & launch animation
| Control | What it governs |
|---|---|
| Launch animation | The per-launch metamorphosis. Off skips straight to the finished scene. |
| Replay launch animation | A button: watch the metamorphosis again right now. |
| Black hole | The animated hole, its gradient glow, and the soft pool under the greeting. The stardust and the intro need this layer on. |
| Infalling stardust | The grains spiralling into the event horizon. |
| Stars & constellations | The twinkling sky. |
| Action buttons | The command-panel and go-to-file pills beneath the greeting. |
Every toggle applies live: flip it and any open empty tab rebuilds on the spot, no reload needed. Turn everything off and the empty tab goes plain (your greeting stays). Re-enable any time.
Why It's There
Most software treats empty states as failure states. Apps say "You have no notes!" with a sad icon and an awkward call-to-action.
The Celestial empty tab takes the opposite approach: the empty state is the most beautiful state in the vault. It's where you breathe. It's where you decide what to write next. It's the room you walk back into when the previous task is done.
You don't need to hurry away from it.
A Note On Performance
The scene is pre-baked and GPU-composited.
Every layer ships pre-rendered: the glow, the shimmer, even the blur are baked into the art itself, so no live filters or paint work run while the scene idles. The animations that do run (twinkle, stardust, shimmer rotation) use only opacity and transform, composited entirely on your GPU. Open as many empty tabs as you like: the wallpaper is decoded once and shared between all of them, and a hidden empty tab costs effectively nothing.
If you ever notice slowness only on the empty tab, it's almost certainly an unrelated background process. (See Performance & Slowness for the broader perf flow.)
Up Next
- Atmosphere & Polish Toggles: the master Animations switch and its neighbors
- The Journal Widget — the streak counter you see in the sidebar
- The Shortcut Bar — context-aware shortcuts at the bottom of the window
- The Four Veils — what plays when you navigate between notes
Celestial On Your Phone
The Celestial Vault runs on iOS and Android. How to set it up on mobile, what carries over, and the few things that stay desktop-only.
The Journal Widget
The Journal Widget tracks your streak in a perfect square in the sidebar. Configurable images, counter modes, six streak-completion rules, an editable history file, and a celebratory burst.