Claudian - Minimal

A quieter, minimal look for Claudian, the Obsidian plugin that brings Claude Code and other coding agents into your vault.

Claudian - Minimal is an independent companion plugin, not made by or affiliated with the Claudian author or with the Minimal theme. It needs Claudian installed and enabled; without Claudian it loads but changes nothing.

What it changes

• Flat, quiet chat: your messages sit in a soft speech bubble, replies stay full width, and thinking and tool blocks get thin guide lines with muted labels and icons.
• Tables: shaded cells separated by thin gaps instead of borders. Wide tables scroll sideways inside the message, and long cells wrap at spaces instead of stretching the chat.
• Wide content stays inside the chat: long words, links and code blocks never add a horizontal scrollbar to the panel.
• Task notifications stay open, with their text rendered as Markdown, even inside a collapsed "Worked for…" group.
• Ask-user prompts wrap: long questions and options are no longer cut off.
• Clearer tabs: the current tab is highlighted, and tabs that are running, need you, are done or failed get a colored dot.
• Accent everywhere: Claudian's orange follows your theme's accent, or a color you pick, and active toggles like YOLO mode use it too.
• Tabs named after the linked note, instead of a number.
• Open in Claudian: right-click a folder or a file and choose Open in Claudian to chat with it as the linked content, whether or not tabs follow your notes.
• Blocks open by default in the newest reply: tool calls, thinking, "Worked for…" groups and subagent sections. They close again when a newer reply starts, so older replies stay compact.

Settings

You type the sizes and limits in a box. Taller content scrolls inside its box, and a height limit of 0 removes it. The two backgrounds are a share of the text color, so they adapt to light and dark themes. Every value has a button that restores the plugin's default. All the settings show up in Obsidian's settings search.

Compatibility

Needs Obsidian 1.13 or later. Tested with Claudian 2.3.35 on Obsidian 1.14.5. Desktop only, like Claudian.

Claudian - Minimal works with Claudian's internal structure: its CSS classes, its tab manager and its tab bar. A Claudian update can change those. When that happens, the affected part stops working and Claudian keeps working as usual. Please open an issue with your Claudian version. COMPATIBILITY.md lists the Claudian versions checked so far.

Privacy

Claudian - Minimal makes no network requests and collects no telemetry. It doesn't read or change your notes. The only file it writes is its own data.json, which holds the settings and a little tab state.

Installation

Install it from Claudian - Minimal in Obsidian's plugin directory. You can also open Settings → Community plugins → Browse in Obsidian, search for "Claudian - Minimal", then install and enable it.

To install it manually, download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release into <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/claudian-minimal/, then enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

How it works

• Styles: styles.css carries the look. The Appearance settings reach it as CSS variables on <body> (--cm-…), set with Obsidian's setCssProps. Every variable has a fallback that matches its default.
• Scrollable tables: the plugin wraps each chat table in a div.claudian-table-scroll, which becomes the scroll container. The table keeps a real table layout, so prose columns wrap while short columns keep their width.
• Task notifications: Claudian renders a notification's text when its header is first clicked. The plugin clicks each new header once, without bubbling.
• Open by default: Claudian builds a block's content on its first click too, so the plugin clicks each closed header once, only in the newest reply of each chat. A block you close yourself stays closed, and blocks the plugin opened close again when a newer reply starts.
• Tab names: the plugin wraps the method Claudian uses to build the tab bar, and replaces each tab's title with the name of its linked note.
• Open the note on tab switch: the plugin wraps the tab manager's switchToTab. After you switch tabs in the chat, it shows the tab's linked note: a leaf that already shows it is brought forward, otherwise it opens in the most recent main-area leaf. Focus stays in the chat. It only reacts to switches you make with the Claudian view active.
• Tabs follow the notes: when you open a note or canvas, the plugin switches to the Claudian tab linked to it. With no such tab, and once the note has stayed active for 1.5 seconds, it creates a tab: with the latest conversation linked to the note if there is one, otherwise a new empty one. Notes that are already open get their tabs too, once Claudian's tabs have settled after startup. Closing a note closes its tab. A tab that is working is never cut off: it closes once its reply ends, unless you reopen the note first. Closing the last tab leaves a fresh empty one. With more than one tab, empty tabs close by themselves: tabs with no conversation and nothing typed, other than the one you're on and the tabs of notes that are open. The conversation stays in the history. Closing a Claudian tab closes the Obsidian tabs showing its note, except pinned ones, and not while another Claudian tab still uses the note. The tab bar stays visible with a single tab, so its name shows, as in Obsidian. The tabs are listed in the order of their notes in Obsidian; tabs whose note isn't open come after, in Claudian's order. This only changes the tab bar: Claudian's own order, used for example by tab numbers, stays as it is. While this setting is on, an empty tab keeps the note it was linked to instead of following whichever note is active. Together with the setting above, tabs and notes mirror each other.
• Open in Claudian: Claudian can link a chat to a folder only from its welcome screen, and its own Add to Claudian menu item covers files only, pasting a mention instead of linking. The plugin adds Open in Claudian to the right-click menu of every file and folder (not the vault root), right before the Terminal plugin's items. It switches to the Claudian tab linked to it; with none, it reopens its latest conversation in a new tab, or opens a new empty tab linked to it, then brings the chat forward with the cursor in the input. A file also opens in the editor (a tab that already shows it is brought forward), so it works the same whether or not Open a Claudian tab when opening a note is on. The empty tab is linked explicitly, so it keeps its file or folder instead of following the active note. An empty folder tab doesn't close by itself like other empty tabs. Folder tabs come first in the tab bar, A to Z by name, before the note tabs (display only, like the note order). While the plugin orders the tabs (notes following Obsidian, or folder tabs open), dragging tabs and Claudian's Move left / Move right (Claudian 2.3.42 and later) are turned off, since the plugin's order would undo them. With Open the linked note when switching tabs on, switching to a folder's tab expands and highlights the folder in the file explorer, with a flash in a shade of the accent instead of Obsidian's highlight color, and the focus comes back to the chat. Opening a note still switches to that note's tab, as before.
• Close other tabs: right-click a Claudian tab and choose Close other tabs. The plugin adds the item to Claudian's tab menu. Tabs that are working stay open, and if any of the others has a reply you haven't read, it asks before closing. The conversations stay in Claudian's history.
• Compact from the context gauge: click the context usage gauge under the input to compact the conversation. After you confirm, the plugin sends /compact in that tab, as if you had typed it, and puts back anything you had typed. It does nothing while a reply is running.
• Settings: built with Obsidian's declarative settings API, so Obsidian renders them and indexes them for its settings search. The number boxes and sliders render their own rows, to keep their restore-default buttons.

Development

There is no build step: main.js and styles.css are the source.

./install.sh "/path/to/your/vault"

Then turn the plugin off and on in Obsidian to load the new files.

To test a change before it's released, work on a branch and install it with --dev. Settings → Community plugins then shows the version with -dev after it, and the repo's manifest.json stays as it is:

./install.sh --dev "/path/to/your/vault"

To test the exact release files, or to test on another machine, push a release candidate tag, for example git tag 1.1.0-rc.1 && git push origin 1.1.0-rc.1. The GitHub Action builds the files with that version and publishes a pre-release. A pre-release is never the "latest" release, so Obsidian's directory doesn't offer it to anyone. Install it by hand from the pre-release's assets, as in Installation but from that release's page. Don't bump the version on main for a candidate: bump it only for the real release.

To release a new version:

1. Update version in manifest.json and add the same version to versions.json.
2. Commit and push.
3. Push a tag with exactly that version, without a v. For example, git tag 1.0.1 && git push origin 1.0.1.
4. The GitHub Action attests main.js, manifest.json and styles.css, then creates a draft release with them and notes that list the merged pull requests. Edit the notes, then publish the release.

Credits

Built for Claudian by Yishen Tu.

License

MIT