The wrong workspace drains you before you even start.
Menus too bright. Fonts too small. Notes crammed together like receipts in a junk drawer.
If you’re writing SOPs, asset reports, or field service guides, you already spend your day inside clunky software. You don’t need your note-taking tool to be another source of friction.
That’s why I use Obsidian. It’s a plain-text note app that works locally, connects ideas like a brain map, and, best of all, doesn’t have to look like the walls at your dentist’s office.
The right theme can reduce visual noise, boost recall, and help you focus long enough to finish that equipment lifecycle guide you’ve been putting off since February.
I pulled five standout themes from the Obsidian repository that bring color without clutter. And options that keep your notes readable, your eyes intact, and your settings menu mostly ignored.
Let’s get into it.
1| Royal Velvet
Deep, bold, and low-key regal. The Royal Velvet theme is inspired by natural volcanic glass, but instead of giving you a geology lecture, it gives you a workspace that doesn’t scream at your corneas.
This one plays well with the style settings plugin. You can tweak fonts, spacing, and header color to fit whatever mental mode you’re in.
I especially like that you can customize inline title colors without breaking the whole visual hierarchy. Small fix, big impact.
Get the Royal Velvet theme here
2 | Night Owl
Originally a VSCode theme, Night Owl found its way to Obsidian and kept its good habits. It uses a dual-font system: headings in Rubik, body text in Karla.
That combo hits a sweet spot between structure and softness.
It’s easy on the eyes in low light, but still has enough contrast to keep things legible. I recommend this one if you’re in and out of long-form drafts all day and don’t want to squint your way through headers.
Get the Night Owl theme here
3 | AnuPpuccin
If you’re the kind of person who color-codes your Google Drive and your fridge labels, AnuPpuccin is going to make your day.
It’s absurdly customizable. You can enable rainbow folders, adjust italic weights, and assign custom CSS to specific elements.
I use the callout customization to visually tag which folders hold SOPs in review, final, or published states. It keeps me sane when everything else is a blur.
Get the AnuPpuccin theme here
4 | Everforest
Soft greens, warm neutrals, and a layout that doesn’t yell at you.
Everforest is built for long-haul screen time. It offers just enough contrast to keep content readable without frying your retinas.
It also supports semantic highlighting, italic tracking, and markdown formats you actually use.
If you spend hours editing process docs, this theme gets out of your way and keeps your eyeballs intact.
Get the Everforest theme here
5 | Obsidianite
Dark mode, but without the Developer Dungeon aesthetic. Obsidianite keeps things clean with a charcoal base and a few gentle gradient accents to break up the monotony.
It’s dead simple, which is the point. If you’re documenting systems, writing microcopy, or doing anything that requires low-friction focus, this theme respects your time.
Get the Obsidianite theme here
A theme won’t write your documentation for you. But it can trick your brain into staying put for twenty more minutes. And sometimes, that’s enough.
Obsidian lets you build a writing environment that meets your needs, not whatever corporate default a project manager slapped together during a sprint review.
If you work in healthcare tech, you don’t get a lot of say in the tools you’re given. But you do have control over this one.
