Velocity: a futuristic Obsidian theme you configure through Style Settings

What Velocity is, and how long it took

Velocity is a sleek and futuristic theme for Obsidian, and the project describes it as born out of a relentless, one-year-long pursuit of design perfection. The tagline is that it is the theme of tomorrow, in your hands today.

The design targets are stated in the FAQ. The theme is designed for creatives, thinkers and note takers of all kinds, and the specific promise is a vault that looks premium and polished, like it came straight out of a native macOS application.

The origin story in the Background section is more interesting than a typical theme README, because it explains the shift in the design. Velocity was initially born out of a desire to recreate the future as envisioned in the 2000s, so it was once a retro-futuristic theme with period-appropriate tactile decorations and shiny gradients. The earliest versions genuinely looked like that. What shipped later moved away from it, and the current identity is a modern, restrained, futuristic take.

The credits section lists the themes that inspired the work, and the FAQ adds a defensive note that any other resemblances are purely coincidental, which is the standard answer to the question every theme author gets.

The releases are 2.2.1 from 2026-08-05, 2.2.0 from 2026-06-28 and 2.1.2 from the same day in June, and the README notes that 2.2.0 marked the one-year anniversary of the first modern version of the theme and added a highly stylized light mode colour scheme. The licence is GPL-3.0.

Customisation goes through Style Settings, not a stylesheet

The first FAQ entry answers how to customise the theme, and the answer is that you do not edit the theme's CSS at all.

The instruction is to download the Style Settings plugin from inside the Obsidian app's plugin store. The plugin is free, and the settings for Velocity should appear automatically as long as the theme is enabled. Within it there are two entry points, Quick Settings for changing layout and colours, and the Configurator for going deeper into the theme's features.

That is a good design decision for a theme, and it changes what the theme is. A theme that expects you to copy a stylesheet and edit it is a starting point you then own, and every update overwrites your work. A theme driven by Style Settings keeps the values in Obsidian's own settings, so the theme can be updated underneath and the values survive.

The second FAQ entry shows the limits of that approach, with a font override toggle in the Quick Settings. The explanation is that Velocity has been designed and tweaked around the font it is bundled with, and that the author strongly encourages experiencing the theme the way it is meant to look before changing the font, which may introduce visual bugs and imperfections. Changing the typeface is supported, but it is the one setting the author asks you to try last.

The third and fourth entries give the audience, the creatives and thinkers, and the answer to how long the work has taken, around one year and two months as of the release of 2.0.0.

CSS classes: per note control without a settings key

Velocity ships a set of CSS classes that change the styling of elements on a note-by-note basis, and the names are worth reading because they are the vocabulary of the theme in practice.

| Name                  | Function                                                   |
| :-------------------- | :--------------------------------------------------------- |
| `override`            | Quick utility to disable any other cssclasses in the note. |
| `hide-metadata`       | Hides any properties visible in the note.                  |
| `hide-title`          | Hides the inline-title for that particular note.           |
| `show-title`          | Shows the inline-title for that particular note.           |
| `style-justify` / `justified` | Justifies paragraph, blockquote and callout text.  |
| `style-margin-top`    | Adds additional padding to the top of the note.            |
| `style-wide`  | Sets maximum note width, equivalent to disabling readable width.   |
| `large-heading`        | Turns editor H1 into a larger heading.         |
| `super-heading`          | Like `large-heading`, but with bolder type and no underline. |
| `simple-title`        | Gives the inline title the standard heading style.         |

The design is worth noting. Most of these are per note rather than global, so you can justify the text in one note and leave it ragged in another, or widen a single note that holds a wide diagram. The override class is the escape hatch, a quick way to switch off any of the other classes for one note, which is the kind of small utility that only appears once a theme has been used for a while.

The style-wide class is described as setting the maximum note width, equivalent to disabling readable width, and it is the one that matters for people who write tables or code.

The two heading classes are a typographic ladder, with large-heading turning the editor H1 into a larger heading and super-heading doing the same with bolder type and no underline.

Auto-Hide: the sidebar disappears when the window is narrow

The Auto-Hide feature is the one the project is most explicit about borrowing, and it credits the source directly. It is a novel feature first pioneered in Micro Mike, and the ability to automatically hide the sidebars whenever the window's width is too narrow.

The stated purpose is to prevent the main panel from becoming too cramped or unreadable. On a phone, or in a narrow split view on a laptop, an Obsidian window with both sidebars open leaves very little room for the note itself, and the sidebars do not earn their space at that width. Hiding them and letting the content take the window is a simple answer to a real problem.

It is also, notably, a feature that the theme author did not want to lose while making significant alterations to the interface, so it was carried over from another theme rather than reinvented.

Auto-Hide can be disabled in the theme's Style Settings, which matters if you use Obsidian on a wide screen in a split view and want the sidebars always visible, or if you find the sidebars popping back when you resize the window.

There is a demonstration GIF of the behaviour in the assets directory, and the repository also ships screenshots of the colour panels and the mobile layout.

Math callouts, and the features that were left out on purpose

Velocity provides an alternative callout style inspired by the outlined look seen in most mathematics textbooks, and using it requires a manual step.

You set the callout type manually to a math callout, and to change the colour you append a dash followed by the colour name, for example a math callout in red. The valid colours are all the default rainbow colours included in Obsidian, from red to pink.

So the syntax is a callout type that Obsidian does not know, and the theme supplies the rendering for it. That is a small illustration of how the theme extends Obsidian rather than only restyling it.

The planned features list is where the project is honest about what it will not do. Several colour schemes for light and dark mode are checked off, as is full support for mobile devices, and one item is still open, a partial implementation of Damian Korcz's Alternative Checkboxes reference set.

The FAQ explains the omissions more broadly. Certain popular features, such as rainbow folders and headings, have been intentionally left out because they conflict with Velocity's visual identity. Features are added on a case-by-case basis, and requests go to the GitHub issues tab or to the Obsidian Discord thread for Velocity.

So the theme has a point of view, and a request that conflicts with it will be declined.

The build, and the plugin compatibility cost

The repository layout shows how the theme is put together. There is a src directory holding the sources, a theme.css at the root, a manifest.json, an assets directory with the screenshots, and a compile.dart script with a pubspec.yaml and pubspec.lock. The presence of a Dart script and a pubspec alongside the stylesheet sources means the stylesheet build runs through a Dart tool rather than a plain Sass watcher.

The primary language of the repository is recorded as SCSS, which is the source of the theme.css, and the build artefacts are committed.

The bigger issue for an adopter is plugin compatibility, and the FAQ is unusually blunt about it. Velocity may interfere with the styling of some plugins' settings or menus in a way that is not intended or aesthetic. The project calls that a necessary tradeoff when designing a theme which makes significant alterations to the user interface.

The reassurance that follows is reasonable. Testing has shown that most plugins work normally with Velocity, and the worst issues you may experience are minor visual bugs or misaligned elements, with plugin functionality unaffected. That is the shape of the risk: not broken plugins, but a plugin's settings dialog that no longer looks like the one its author designed.

The alternative is a minimal theme, one that changes colours and typography and leaves the interface otherwise alone. Such a theme will not clash with anything and will not look like the theme of tomorrow, and for a vault full of plugin dialogs that is a reasonable exchange.

Maintenance: one author, weekends, and a stated policy

The issues policy section is the most unusual thing in the README, and any adopter should read it before filing anything.

The author says that issues and feature requests are free to send at any time, but that they will only be read and worked on during weekends. There is no guarantee that an issue or feature request will be completed in the same week it was posted, and the reason given is that the author has work to do outside of theme development.

That is a candour that is better than a silent backlog, and it sets the expectation properly. A theme maintained by one person on weekends is a weekend project with a professional finish, not a supported product, and the difference matters when a bug blocks your workflow.

The project also asks for money in a way that matches the situation, with a Ko-fi link in the header and the news section noting that tips and donations via Ko-fi are now accepted.

The rest of the state is straightforward. The last push to the repository was on 2026-08-05, which is the same date as the 2.2.1 release, so the tree and the latest tag agree. The README's news section still says the latest release is 2.2.0 as of June 2026, which is one patch behind, and a small thing to keep in mind when you read the project page.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Velocity if you want an Obsidian vault that looks deliberately designed rather than default, and you are willing to learn the Style Settings panel and the CSS class names, because that is where the customisation lives. Do not adopt it if your vault depends on plugin interfaces looking exactly as their authors designed them, since the project states that a theme making significant interface alterations may restyle plugin settings and menus. Before you switch, read the issue policy and the FAQ, because the maintenance is a single author working on weekends and the theme is opinionated enough that you will want to know what it deliberately leaves out.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Gonzalo-D-Sales/obsidian-velocity on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: GPL-3.0
4. README
5. Releases