A dark, noir-bureau theme for Obsidian — a worn case-file on a concrete desk, wired to a humming CRT terminal.
I've always been fond of the bureau-redacted look — the noiresque elements, the brutalism of it: heavy type, stamped labels, blacked-out lines, concrete and steel. I wanted a UI that felt like a brutalist-noir interface that was actually cohesive — not a pile of effects, but a single room you could work inside. Bureau is that attempt.
Its mood is stitched from three places:
- Control — the austere institutional dread of the Federal Bureau of Control (the default red accent).
- The Magnus Archives — dusty archives and quiet wrongness (the green accent, Magnus).
- Deus Ex — black-and-gold cyber-renaissance (the gold accent, Deus).
Dark-only. Every texture is procedural SVG (no embedded images), the whole UI reads from a single accent colour, and there's an optional CRT layer — scanlines, phosphor glow, a flickering scan line, a power-on when you open a note.
Community themes: Settings → Appearance → Manage → search Bureau.
Manual:
- Download
theme.cssandmanifest.json. - Drop them into
<vault>/.obsidian/themes/Bureau/. - Settings → Appearance → Themes → Bureau.
Install the Style Settings plugin. Everything below lives there, under one Bureau panel.
All controls are in Settings → Style Settings → Bureau. The panel preserves your choices — switching presets never overwrites them.
A quick preset that layers over everything else:
| Mode | Result |
|---|---|
| Low | Base styling only — no textures, glow, CRT, or motion |
| Medium | Textures + ambient glow; no CRT or animation |
| High | Everything on |
| Custom | Use the individual toggles below (your saved settings) |
- Accent preset — Control (red) · Magnus (green) · Deus (gold) · Custom. The one colour the whole UI, glow, and highlights read from.
- Custom accent — your own colour, used when the preset is Custom.
- Glow intensity / reach — the accent glow rising from the bottom of the window.
- Film grain (+ intensity) — fine grain over the whole window.
- Sidebar texture (+ strength) — concrete grain on the panels behind the cards.
- Vignette (+ amount) — darkened window edges.
- CRT scanlines (+ spacing) — faint horizontal lines over the editor.
- CRT text glow (+ brightness) — phosphor bloom on body text.
- Typewriter tooltips — tooltips type in character by character.
- Fullscreen CRT mode — in fullscreen, a curved tube vignette, amped scanlines/glow, and chrome that recedes until hover.
- Focus line (+ dim amount) — dims every editor line but the one you're on, with an accent edge marker.
- Cards layout — float every pane as a bordered card on a dark desk.
- Card gap / rounding / shadow darkness.
- Tab shape — Folder (connected file-folder tabs) or Pill (fully rounded).
- Main / Left sidebar / Right sidebar tab content — Icons · Labels · Icons + Labels.
- Pinned tabs → icon only.
- Focus Mode — hides the tab bar, window buttons, and status bar at once. Bind a hotkey to Style Settings → Toggle Focus Mode.
- À-la-carte: hide the status bar, breadcrumbs, tab close button, left/right sidebar toggles, folder collapse arrow, command-palette instructions.
Restrained and CRT-flavoured — eased, never bouncy. A master Animations toggle gates everything, with a speed slider (400–1000 ms; hover/state runs snappier).
- CRT power-on — content fades in from black when a note/pane opens.
- Channel-change crossfade — fade-from-black + scan-line wipe on note switch.
- Boot scan-sweep — a bright line wipes down once at launch.
- Scanning line — a faint white line scans slowly down the editor and glitches like a loose wire (sliders for brightness, glitch interval, and glitch depth).
- Breathe the ambient glow, ease the phosphor glow, fade menus & modals.
- Terminal block caret, hover bloom (accent glow on hover), active-line scan, CRT flicker, CRT loading throbber, eased checkbox tick.
- MOBILE — disable animations.
Per-weekday colour schemes (Sun–Sat), each with its own accent, text,
and background. Add the cssclass: daily (or a weekday class) to a note to
key its palette. Disable the old "Daily Note Themes" snippet — Bureau owns this.
Bureau borrows ideas, gratefully, from:
- blobob — the hiding/focus options, the animation principles, and the tab styling approach.
- Daily Note Themes (CyanVoxel) — the per-weekday colour-scheme idea.
- Elysian — styling inspiration.
- Minimalist Paradise — styling inspiration.
Fonts (loaded via Google Fonts, with system fallbacks): Urbanist and Courier Prime, both OFL.
The theme is a single theme.css. Edit it and reload Obsidian (hard-reload, or
toggle the theme off/on — Obsidian caches theme.css). Retheme from the
.theme-dark token block at the top; the Style Settings config lives in the
@settings block at the foot.
MIT