Obsidian Theme: Doctorfree

v1.x | Designed & Coded with 💎 by Dr. Ronald Joe Record
This custom theme is designed for use with Obsidian
⚡ Inspired by the Night Owl theme by Ben Hong and the Obsidianite theme by Benny Guo

CHANGES | OBSIDIAN FORUM | INSTALL

Table of Contents

• Screenshots
• Installation
• Obsidian Settings
• Local Dev Environment
• Recommended Obsidian Community plugins
• FAQ
• Typography
• Obsidian plus NB
• Obsidian license restriction
• Credit

Screenshots

Installation

Obsidian Marketplace

1. Open the Settings in Obsidian
2. Navigate to Appearances tab under Options
3. Under the Themes section, click on the Browse or Manage button
4. Search for Doctorfree in the Filter text input in the upper left corner
5. Click Use this theme or Install and use and you're done! 🎉

Manual

git clone https://github.com/doctorfree/Obsidian-Doctorfree.git
cd Obsidian-Doctorfree
mkdir -p /path/to/vault/.obsidian/themes/Doctorfree
cp manifest.json /path/to/vault/.obsidian/themes/Doctorfree/manifest.json
cp theme.css /path/to/vault/.obsidian/themes/Doctorfree/theme.css

1. Open the Settings in Obsidian
2. Navigate to Appearances tab under Options
3. Under the Themes section, click on the dropdown menu next to Theme heading
4. Select for Doctorfree and then you're done! 🎉'

Obsidian Settings

• Settings -> Appearance -> Basic color scheme: Dark
• Settings -> Appearance -> Themes: Doctorfree

Optional Obsidian Settings

• Settings -> Appearance -> Font:
  • I use Mononoki Nerd Font and Mononoki Nerd Font Mono
  • The default font size in Obsidian is too small, I bump it up to 24
• Settings -> Appearance -> Advanced: Disable Show inline title
• Settings -> Editor -> Default view for new tabs: Reading view

Local Dev Environment

This is for people who want to clone the repo and work with the file locally.

1. Clone the repo
2. Install dependencies (npm install)
3. Create .env with a file path to where your theme directory lives
   • Use .env-sample to see the format.
4. Run npm run setup
5. Run npm start

All changes made to SCSS files will automatically be migrated into your Obsidian environment.

Recommended Obsidian Community plugins

This Obsidian theme has been configured for use with the Style Settings community plugin. The theme CSS includes comments that enable easy customization of colors, fonts, and additional typography. This is an optional feature and can be enabled by installing the Style Settings plugin.

Obsidian community plugins we have found useful and can recommend include the following:

• Contextual Typography: Enables enhanced preview typography
• Dataview: Treats an Obsidian Vault as a database from which you can query
• Excalibrain: An interactive structured mind-map of an Obsidian vault
• Excalidraw: Edit and view Excalidraw in Obsidian
• Hider: Hides various elements of the UI
• Hover-editor: Turns the hover popover into a full featured editor
• Pandoc: Adds command palette options to export your notes to a variety of formats
• Quickadd: Quickly add content to a vault
• Shellcommands: Define and run shell commands
• Style Settings: Enables theme customization
• Templater: Defines a powerful templating language

FAQ

How do I customize this theme?

Easiest: Use Obsidian Style Settings Plugin

This allows you to configure the theme directly in Obsidian without any CSS knowledge required!

If you have specific requests, please open an issue here!

Intermediate: Add CSS snippets

Check out CSS snippets as a way to progressively enhance the theme.

Here's a useful forum post to help get you started.

🎩 Thanks to the suggestion by @DutchPete!

Hard: Create a fork of this theme

This is arguably the most reliable route, but will require some familiarity with coding.

I recommend using Node.js so you can leverage the Sass and make meaningful changes.

The Sass partials are a work in progress and may change over time.

Typography

Preview Mode

When in preview mode, the typography is inspired by a dual font family system to easily distinguish between headings and regular text.

• Headings: Rubik
• Body: Karla

Editor Mode

When in edit mode, the typography is inspired from a developer like environment where you're "coding" your second-brain.

• IBM Plex Mono

Obsidian plus NB

The open source command line tool nb is another powerful knowledge base application. Obsidian and nb can be used together to provide an even more powerful, rich, flexible, cross-platform knowledge base. In addition to note-taking, nb provides features like bookmarking, archiving, encryption, filtering, format conversion, todos with tasks, and more.

Both nb and Obsidian utilize plain text data storage in Markdown format. Both sync across platforms with git. They complement one another and work well together. For example, to create an nb notebook from an existing Obsidian vault (or any repository with markdown):

nb notebooks add cheat-sheets https://github.com/doctorfree/cheat-sheets.git

This would create an nb notebook named 'cheat-sheets'. The 'cheat-sheets' nb notebook is just a clone of the specified Github repository. If that repository were an Obsidian vault then changes/updates to the Obsidian vault can now be made in either Obsidian or nb. All changes will automatically sync and be available across all platforms where either Obsidian or nb is deployed.

Obsidian license restriction

Obsidian is free for personal use. However, the license includes a restriction on the use of Obsidian for revenue generating activities. Here is the relevant section from the Obsidian license:

You need to pay for Obsidian if and only if you use it to contribute, directly
or indirectly, to revenue-generating, work-related activities in a company that
has two or more people.

The nb note-taking command line application has no such restriction and is completely free and open source software licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.

Credit

🎩 Hat tip to the Night Owl theme and the Obsidianite theme for serving as the base themes I used to create this theme.