California Coast: a minimalist Obsidian theme built on Sass and Big Sur typography

The design argument: typography instead of decoration

California Coast is described as a minimalist Obsidian theme inspired by macOS Big Sur, and the project is written almost entirely as CSS. That combination is the point.

The design brief is Big Sur, and Big Sur is a release of macOS defined by restraint: a lot of white space, a clear typographic hierarchy, few borders, few filled surfaces, and typography doing the work that panels and buttons would otherwise do. Applied to Obsidian, which is a markdown editor with a very large default interface, that means the chrome recedes and the text carries the hierarchy.

The repository structure reflects a theme built as a stylesheet rather than as a plugin. The primary language is CSS, and the tree is short: an obsidian.css at the root, a src/ directory holding the sources, a gulpfile.js, an icons.json, a package.json, a screenshots/ directory and a yarn.lock.

The icons.json file is worth a note, because Obsidian themes can ship custom icons and the format of that file is where you would find them. The screenshots/ directory holds the four images used in the project documentation, numbered 01, 02, 03 and 05, which is a reasonable way to show a theme since a theme is a visual artefact and a text description cannot replace it.

The absence of a homepage in the repository metadata is also a signal. There is no marketing site and no demo page. The theme is distributed through the repository and its release tags, and the documentation is the issue tracker.

Four companion plugins do the work the theme leaves to them

The most useful section of the project documentation is the recommended plugins list, because it tells you that California Coast is one part of a set rather than a finished look on its own.

Style Settings, by the same author, enables theme customization. Contextual Typography, also by the same author, enables enhanced preview typography. System Dark Mode, by kepano, matches the theme to the system's light or dark mode setting. Hider, also by kepano, hides various elements of the interface. Embedded Note Titles, again by mgmeyers, is the fifth entry.

The division of labour is sensible once you see it. A theme file cannot hide interface elements, and the Obsidian API deliberately gives themes no scripting, so hiding the ribbon, the status bar or the file explorer has to be done by a plugin. A theme also cannot offer user-selectable options, which is what Style Settings provides by exposing CSS variables as sliders. And a theme cannot follow the operating system colour scheme by itself, which is what the system dark mode plugin adds.

Contextual Typography is the one that matters most for the reading experience, since it changes how the preview renders headings, lists and quotes rather than how the chrome is painted.

So the honest description of California Coast is a typographic base with a recommended stack on top. A user who installs the theme alone gets a plainer Obsidian. A user who installs the five plugins gets the design the screenshots show.

The build: Gulp and Sass, two npm scripts

The theme is compiled from Sass, and the build is small enough to describe in full.

The package.json lists seven dependencies, and they are all build-time: dotenv at 8.2.0, gulp at 4.0.2, gulp-concat, gulp-rename, gulp-sass at 5.0.0 and sass at 1.44.0. There is no runtime dependency at all, which is exactly what you want from a theme, since the shipped artifact is a stylesheet that Obsidian loads directly.

The two scripts are:

  "scripts": {
    "build": "gulp css",
    "dev": "gulp css:watch"
  }

The build task compiles the stylesheets, and the dev task is the watch variant, so the workflow for someone who wants to adjust the theme is to run the dev script, edit the Sass sources in src/, and let the watcher rebuild. The gulpfile.js at the repository root holds the task definitions, and the presence of gulp-concat and gulp-rename tells you the pipeline produces more than one file: sources are concatenated and then renamed, most likely to emit both a normal stylesheet and a development variant with the output name Obsidian expects.

The dotenv dependency is a small sign of a real workflow rather than a demo. It means the build can read settings from a local environment file, which is what a maintainer uses to keep personal values out of a committed file, and the .gitignore in the tree would be where the local file is excluded.

There is also a .github/ directory, so at least part of the release process is automated, and a LICENSE.md at the root.

Releases stopped in 2021 while the repository kept moving

The version history is the part of this project that deserves the most attention from anyone considering it, because the two dates do not line up.

The recent releases are 2.0.0 from 2021-07-15, 1.0.4 from 2021-04-09 and 1.0.3 from 2021-04-08. So the packaged versions stopped more than five years ago, and the 2.0.0 tag is the last one.

The last push to the repository was on 2026-04-25, and the repository is not archived. So the source has continued to receive work, including the 2.0.0 major bump and whatever came after it, while the published theme tags have not moved since July 2021.

That split has a practical consequence. Someone installing from the release tags gets a 2021 build of a theme, while someone building from the current src/ directory gets something newer, and the difference between them is not documented in the repository. It also means the packaged theme you get has not been checked against the Obsidian versions released since 2021, and Obsidian's CSS class names do change between releases, which is the usual reason an old theme starts to look partly broken.

The gap also tells you something about the theme's reception. A theme that had picked up steady use would have had a reason to keep cutting releases, particularly if Obsidian's own appearance had drifted from the Big Sur look it was imitating.

One more inconsistency sits in the same tree. The licence field in the repository metadata says GPL-3.0, and the LICENSE.md file at the root is the one the project points to, while the package.json inside the repository declares the license field as MIT. Two different licences in one project is a real discrepancy rather than a formatting difference, and it is the sort of thing that matters only if you intend to redistribute the theme or build on its source.

Extra features, contributions and where California Coast is the wrong tool

Two smaller features are documented that are worth knowing about.

The theme supports the image position controls from SlRvb, with the guide linked from an Obsidian ITS Theme repository. The guide is a set of documented CSS variables for positioning images in the preview, and support for them means the theme's own variables are written so that a third party's position scheme works with it rather than conflicting with it. That is a small piece of interop between two independent theme projects.

Contributions are handled in the usual way, with an issue or a pull request. The project documentation also says that if you find the theme useful you can sponsor the author on GitHub or buy a coffee, with buttons for both.

With that in place, the case against California Coast is a short one. The first limit is that it is a theme, not a plugin, and it therefore cannot do anything the Obsidian API does not allow a stylesheet to do. Anyone who wants hidden elements, adjustable options, a system-matched colour scheme or better preview typography needs the four companion plugins, and a user who refuses to install plugins gets a plainer Obsidian rather than the designed one.

The second is the age of the published artefact. A theme tagged in 2021 and applied to a 2026 Obsidian will show its age in whichever places Obsidian has renamed or restructured its classes, and the repository does not document a compatibility range.

The third is the licence question again, which for a personal vault is irrelevant and for anyone shipping the theme is not.

And the fourth is the scope of the design itself. If what you want is a colourful, high-contrast, icon-rich workspace, a minimalist theme modelled on a text-first operating system is the wrong starting point, however well executed it is.

Editorial conclusion

California Coast is worth installing if you want Obsidian to read like plain text on a page rather than like an application, because the theme's whole argument is typographic, and because the recommended plugin set fills in the parts the theme deliberately leaves alone, with Contextual Typography for the preview, Style Settings for the options, System Dark Mode for the colour scheme and Hider for the chrome. It is the wrong tool if you want a themed note-taking app with colour, and it is the wrong tool if you will not install plugins. Before you commit, check three things: that the packaged versions stopped at 2.0.0 on 2021-07-15 while the last push to the repository was on 2026-04-25, so the published theme and the current source are different vintages; that the licence stated in the repository metadata is GPL-3.0 while the package.json in the same tree says MIT, and that difference is worth resolving before you redistribute anything; and that the theme is a single compiled obsidian.css, so the build step with Gulp and Sass matters if you want to modify it rather than only install it.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: GPL-3.0
3. mgmeyers/obsidian-california-coast-theme on GitHub
4. README
5. Releases