Minimal 5.0: Color!

Minimal now comes preloaded with popular color schemes such as Nord, Gruvbox and Solarized — plus a simple way to build your own color scheme. Let's get into this update because it's a big one!

Notes on upgrading to Minimal 5.0

⚠️ Please note, this update includes breaking changes:

• As of 5.0, you can now use Minimal Theme Settings and Style Settings plugins simultaneously. They no longer overlap in functionality. If you use Style Settings you will likely need to re-enter some settings. It should only be a one time change, more detail below.
• Relationship lines have been removed from Minimal Theme Settings and Style Settings, please install the separate Indentation Guides plugin to restore this functionality.

Overview

Minimal 5.0 is all about color. For the past two years, one of my priorities for Minimal has been to create an experience that feels as native as possible to each operating system. As a result, Minimal quickly evolved from just being an Obsidian theme to becoming a full UI replacement for the app. With this evolution, some of the most popular community-driven modifications to Minimal have been snippets to match popular color schemes.

With Minimal 5.0, six of the most popular color schemes are now bundled in, and you can easily create a fully custom color scheme using the new Style Settings features.

Preset color schemes

Along with the default Minimal color scheme, you can now access six color schemes with Minimal Theme Settings plugin. These include Dracula, Gruvbox, Nord, Notion, Solarized, and Things.

You can choose a different color scheme for light mode and dark mode. The new color schemes are also compatible with all seven options for background contrast (high contrast, low contrast, true black, etc). You can also change these settings via the Command Palette and hotkeys. This adds up to 45 predefined color variations that have been hand-tweaked for this release.

Minimal Theme Settings and Style Settings are now compatible

Up until 5.0, using the Minimal Theme Settings and Style Settings plugins simultaneously could cause conflicts. This is no longer the case. Any features present in Minimal Theme Settings have been removed from Style Settings to prevent conflicts and clarify the use case for each plugin.

• Minimal Theme Settings is the primary plugin to access predefined color schemes, fonts, hotkeys, and all the main feature toggles. This plugin is highly recommended for all users of Minimal.
• Style Settings plugin will focus on helping you create a custom color scheme, and nerdy settings that I don't plan to bring into Minimal Theme Settings. This plugin is optional.

If you had been using Style Settings for some of the settings that were deprecated, you will need to migrate those to Minimal Theme Settings. You can use the "Export" button in Style Settings to see all the adjustments that you made if you updated the theme before migrating your settings. If you see any strange behavior, I would recommend using the "reset to default" button in Style Settings before you start creating a new color scheme to make sure there isn't any cruft from past changes you've made.

Customize your color scheme with Style Settings

The Style Settings plugin has been significantly expanded so you can tweak the color of almost all elements. Every color has now been split into light mode and dark mode properties. The new options include:

• Granular background and border colors
• Link colors and link font weight
• Text colors for primary, muted and faint text
• Selected text background color
• Headings font style for italic (closes #141)
• Checkbox color
• List item spacing
• Blockquotes font settings
• Code blocks font settings (#143)

When using Style Settings to create your own color scheme, I would recommend opening Style Settings in a new pane by using the command palette (CMD + P by default), rather than by opening the plugin from the Obsidian Settings. This way you can more easily see the changes that you are making.

More small improvements and fixes

• Further cleanup of the SCSS transition started in Minimal 4.4, breaking out more partials, and moving mobile styles into relevant partials
• Updated icons and text labels to work cross-language as of Obsidian 0.13.22. Text labels still require using the translation snippet to appear in your language, but should degrade more gracefully.
• Initial transparency support for Mac OS — still needs improvement
• Add support for Electron Window Tweaker plugin, for traffic light positioning on Mac
• Add icons for Map View and Leaflet plugins
• Long note titles should fade out correctly on desktop
• Switch .ͼ1 selectors to .cm-editor for more consistent Live Preview styling (closes #158)
• Fixed scroll indicator bug

That's all folks!

If you enjoy Minimal please consider buying me a coffee — it does really fuel some long coding sessions! ☕😊

@kepano