The Celestial Theme

The Celestial Vault ships with its own theme, Celestial. It is a large part of what makes the vault feel the way it does, and since v1.3 it is also one of the most customizable themes you can run in Obsidian.

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Celestial, The Default

Celestial is a deep-space-inspired dark theme designed specifically for the Celestial Vault product. It's not just colors:

• A moody, deep palette of indigos, near-blacks, and gold accents
• Gradient h1 titles in temporal notes (daily / monthly / yearly notes get a soft color gradient on their main heading)
• Animated dividers: <hr> elements have subtle, slow-pulsing keyframe animations
• Day / month / year color theming: Mondays look different from Saturdays, Aprils look different from Octobers, each year gets a quiet annual accent
• Themed typography: a clean sans-serif for body and interface, a serif on temporal note titles
• Custom callout colors that match the overall palette
• Subtle italic styling on inline tags and metadata

It's designed to fade into the page: atmosphere without distraction.

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Origins & Credits

Celestial is a theme flavor developed by Karlos (Karl v. G.) for the Celestial Vault. It began as a carefully tuned configuration of the excellent Baseline theme by Alexis C. and grew into a full fork: recalibrated, extended, and rebranded around the vault's deep-space identity.

Credit where credit is due:

• Baseline by Alexis C. provides the architectural foundation: the layout system, the control styling, and the customization machinery Celestial builds on.
• The shipped dark palette derives from Flexoki by Steph Ango (kepano).
• Baseline bundles a family of community color schemes and layout styles, and their authors' attributions are preserved inside the theme: Catppuccin, Dracula, Rose Pine, Solarized by Ethan Schoonover, Gruvbox by Pavel Pertsev, Nord by Sven Greb, schemes by AnubisNekhet, Vlad Gerasimov (vladstudio), Jose Daniel Mourao, Sainnhe Park, and more.

The theme is MIT licensed. The full license text ships inside the theme folder (.obsidian/themes/Celestial/LICENSE).

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Make It Yours: The Theme Settings Catalog

Since v1.3, the Celestial theme exposes an extensive customization catalog through the bundled Style Settings plugin: 341 controls across roughly 50 sections. The previous version had 5.

Two ways to open it:

1. Settings → Style Settings → Celestial
2. Settings → Celestial Plugin → Polish & atmosphere → Theme appearance → Open theme settings (a one-click shortcut to the same place)

What's inside:

A few favorites:

• Pinned ribbon: keep the left ribbon permanently visible instead of revealing it on hover
• Hover reveal: collapsed sidebars slide in when you touch the window edge, with adjustable trigger area, width, and delay
• Monochrome interface: strip the accent color from buttons and toggles for a neutral look
• Heading typography: font, size, weight, color, style, and alignment for every heading level
• Table polish: zebra stripes for rows and columns, row hover, alignment, tabular numbers
• Link and graph colors: recolor internal links, external links, and every graph element

Safe To Explore

The vault ships pre-calibrated. Every control's default is the shipped look, so changing nothing changes nothing. Every control has a small restore arrow that returns it to the calibrated default, and Style Settings has Export / Import at the top if you want to back up or share a configuration. Experiment freely.

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Day-Of-Week Theming

Daily notes pick up a different color tint based on which day of the week they are:

The day-of-week colors flow into:

• The note's h1 gradient
• The animated divider colors
• The callout accent
• The creation/navigation veil colors

Subtle but visible. Once you've used it for a week, you'll start recognizing what day a note belongs to before you read its title.

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Month-Of-Year Theming

Monthly notes pick up a tint per month (a 12-month gradient through the year). January is cool blue. April is fresh green. October is auburn. December is winter blue.

These flow into:

• Monthly note h1 gradient
• The animated divider colors
• The creation/navigation veil colors when navigating to that month

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Year Theming

Yearly notes get a subtle annual accent (lightly themed, less aggressive than month/day theming since you're spending more time inside a single year than inside a single day).

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Typography Details

The Celestial theme makes a few opinionated typography choices:

• Body text: clean sans-serif, slight letter-spacing tighten, generous line-height
• Temporal note titles: serif, gradient color, larger size
• Metadata / properties: italic, smaller, lower contrast
• Callouts: light backgrounds with strong accent borders

Since v1.3 you can change the fonts directly in Essentials inside the theme settings, and tune every heading level under Editor → Headings. For anything beyond that, your own snippets still work.

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Using Other Themes

You can run the Celestial Vault on any community theme. Since v1.2 the vault's UX layer adapts to whatever theme is active instead of assuming Celestial:

• The shortcut bar and the vault dock detect the active theme: they sit flush at the bottom edge on other themes and lift slightly on Celestial to ride its floating-pane gap
• Note banners are hardened against other themes' image rules, so they keep their full width and height everywhere
• The welcome experience, journal widget, veils, note lock, and shortcuts are theme-independent and keep working

To switch: Settings → Appearance → Themes → Manage, pick any theme. Switch back to Celestial the same way.

Fair warning: the vault's visual identity (day/month/year theming, gradient titles, the calibrated look) is designed around Celestial. Other themes will feel different, not broken.

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How To Inspect The Theme's CSS

If you want to look at how the theme is constructed:

1. Open Obsidian's developer console: Cmd + Option + I (Mac) or Ctrl + Shift + I (Windows / Linux)
2. Click the Sources tab
3. Find themes/Celestial/theme.css

It's regular CSS. Heavy on CSS variables (which is what makes the snippets and the theme settings catalog able to tweak so much without rewriting whole rules).

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What The Theme Doesn't Touch

A few parts of the Celestial Vault are styled by CSS snippets or plugin CSS, not the theme itself:

• The journal widget: styled by celestial-misc-styles.css
• The shortcut bar at the bottom: styled by celestial-plugin's own CSS
• The four veils: animated via CSS keyframes in celestial-shared-animations.css
• The day/month/year color theming: provided by the per-period theme snippets

This is why those features keep working on any theme.

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Up Next

• Celestial CSS Snippets: the snippets that complement the theme
• Changelog: what arrived in each version