catppuccin/obsidian themes Obsidian with four pastel palettes

Four palettes, one theme file, and the split between light and dark

The theme's structure is simple enough to describe in one paragraph, and the shape of the configuration is the part worth understanding. The project provides the full range of Catppuccin palettes when used with the Style Settings plugin, and that plugin is what allows users to pick from several variations, including accents for each color in the palette and one that features the full host of Catppuccin colors, which is the default. New options are exposed through Style Settings over time. The colours themselves come in four flavours, and the readme shows a preview for each of them, Latte, Frappe, Macchiato and Mocha. What is not obvious from the flavour list is how the selection actually works, and the readme is explicit. To use Catppuccin Latte, you set the Base color scheme option to Light. For one of the three dark themes, you set Base color scheme to Dark, and that defaults to Catppuccin Mocha. The other two dark flavours are not reachable through Obsidian's own setting. Installing Style Settings is what changes your dark flavour to Frappe or Macchiato. In other words, Obsidian contributes a binary light or dark choice, and the flavour inside the dark group is a plugin setting, which is a slightly awkward division for a palette family that treats all four as peers.

Installing from the theme store takes four clicks

The install path is the Obsidian theme store, and it is a short sequence inside the app rather than a command line. You open Obsidian and go to Preferences, then Appearance, click Manage and scroll down to Community Themes. You type Catppuccin in the filter bar and then click Use under the theme name. There is no build step for the end user, which is the point of the store route, and the theme store path also means the flavour selection and the Style Settings step are separate, which is the point worth remembering. The alternative route is the manual one, where you copy the theme into your vault's theme folder and enable it, and the readme's own structure implies both routes exist since it links community plugin documentation for the Style Settings side. What the readme does not document is a manual install procedure in detail, or what to do when a theme update lands, so if you are not using the store you are on your own for that part. The Styles Settings plugin itself needs to be installed from the community plugins list, and per the note in the readme that requires turning Restricted Mode off in Preferences under the OPTIONS section, selecting Community plugins, and searching for Style Settings by mgmeyers.

The theme is built from SCSS, and the build is one sass command

Underneath the CSS is a conventional Sass project, and the repository layout shows it. There is an scss/ directory holding the sources, a manifest.json that Obsidian reads to register the theme, an obsidian.css and a theme.css at the root, an assets/ directory with the screenshots, a HISTORY.md changelog, a.stylelintrc.yml, a renovate.json for dependency updates and a pnpm workspace file. The package manifest shows how the stylesheet is produced, with a single build script:

    "build": "sass scss/main.scss:dist/catppuccin.css"

So a contributor compiles scss/main.scss into a dist/catppuccin.css with the sass compiler, which is the only runtime dependency in the manifest. The linting setup is more involved than the build, with stylelint and five supporting packages behind it, including stylelint-config-idiomatic-order for property ordering, the standard and standard-scss configurations, a rule for declaration blocks that ignore properties, and a separate order plugin. The engines field asks for Node 23 or newer and pnpm 10.11 or newer, which is a high floor for a stylesheet project and tells you the toolchain is current rather than conservative. The build output path, dist/catppuccin.css, also tells you that the compiled file is not committed to the root, so anyone pulling the repository and expecting to find a ready to use stylesheet in the source tree will not find one there.

An embedded font is the reason the theme is not entirely CSS

One detail in the readme explains why the primary language of this repository is listed as CSS even though it is a Sass project with a package manifest and a pnpm lockfile. The note says the default editor text uses a base64-encoded version of Friedrich Althausen's font Vollkorn. The font is embedded in the stylesheet as a base64 payload rather than referenced as a file, which means the text renders identically on every machine without the user installing a typeface, at the cost of a larger stylesheet and no way for a user to swap the font without editing the theme. The readme also states plainly that the theme is a constant work in progress, given the quick development pace of Obsidian itself and the user-made plugin scene, and that this note sits alongside an award mention, the theme having been a runner up in Obsidian's 2022 Gems of the Year awards. That combination of an honest status statement and an award badge is a fair summary of where the project sits: a well regarded community theme that tracks a fast moving application.

Plugin support is a short list, and it is the honest limit

The plugin section is short and specific, and it is the clearest boundary in the repository. The theme currently has limited CSS for a few plugins, collected in a single file under the scss/vendors directory, and the list is Another Quick Switcher, Better Command Palette, Obsidian Git, Omnisearch and MAKE.md. Five plugins out of a very large community plugin ecosystem means that for most community plugins you will get the base theme colours and nothing more, and any layout those plugins draw themselves will not be styled. The readme's own framing of the support route is GitHub Issues rather than chat, and it gives the reason explicitly. Obsidian is a large and constantly expanding app with a variety of use cases and plugins, and for theme-related issues or CSS adjustments for a favourite plugin you should open an issue. The readme notes there is a Discord community for the theme but says GitHub Issues are better for the development process because they are less ephemeral, and that they help other users who need support or want to contribute. There is also a link arguing for issues over web forums in general, which tells you the project has a considered position on where its development conversation belongs.

Where this theme is the wrong choice

Two boundaries are worth naming. The first is the flavour selection model described earlier, which is a genuine usability wrinkle rather than a defect. A user who wants Latte for daytime and Mocha at night has to change an Obsidian setting for the light and dark split and a Style Settings entry for the dark flavour, and the readme's guidance that Base color scheme defaults to Mocha means the flavour is chosen in two places at once. The second is the licence position, which is confusing on its face and worth checking before you redistribute anything. The repository badge and the README's own footer point at the Catppuccin organisation's MIT licence, and the LICENSE file at the root is the project's, but the package manifest in this repository declares its licence as ISC. Those are not the same licence, and the discrepancy is exactly the kind of thing a reader should resolve from the LICENSE file rather than from the manifest. A third, smaller point concerns how the theme is distributed to end users. The store route is frictionless, but the manual route has no documented update flow, so a user who installs by hand is likely to sit on an old version until they notice the CSS selectors have stopped matching a newer Obsidian release. Given the stated work-in-progress status and the pace of Obsidian's own releases, that is the practical risk to plan for.

Editorial conclusion

catppuccin/obsidian is a good fit if you already use Catppuccin elsewhere and want your note editor to match, since the palettes are complete and the accent options are exposed through Style Settings rather than buried in a stylesheet. It is the wrong choice if you want to switch between all four flavours from a single Obsidian setting, because the base colour scheme toggle only splits light from dark, and the readme is explicit that the flavour choice for the three dark variants comes from Style Settings. Verify first that the theme appears in the community themes list after installation, that Style Settings is installed and that Restricted Mode is off, and that the Obsidian version you run still matches the CSS selectors the theme targets. The last push was on 2026-10-22 and the newest tagged release is v2.0.4 from 2023-06-22.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. catppuccin/obsidian on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: MIT
4. README
5. Releases