Isinglass

A minimal, translucent frosted-glass theme for Obsidian. Light and dark, for macOS, Windows, and iOS. Colourless by design: luminance does the work, hue only whispers.

Isinglass is a thin transparent sheet of mica.

What you get out of the box

• A layered glass interface: a soft neutral luminous field behind frosted panes, specular edges, fine grain, and real backdrop blur on floating surfaces (menus, command palette, modals, popovers).
• Both modes, colourless. Your accent colour drives highlights, links, and the graph's focus colour; the surfaces themselves stay neutral.
• New York (ui-serif) for reading, the system font for interface, on every platform. Nothing bundled.
• Styled support for Dataview, Tasks, and Notebook Navigator, plus Canvas, Bases, and the graph.

Built to stay legible

Translucency fights contrast, so this theme verifies instead of eyeballing: every build composites every text token over every surface, at every translucency state, against worst-case backdrops, and fails if any pair drops below WCAG AA. Enforced budgets keep backdrop-filter use, !important count, and file size in check.

The theme honours prefers-reduced-transparency and prefers-reduced-motion, ships an opaque high-contrast mode, and responds to the OS "reduce transparency" setting.

Style Settings

Install the Style Settings plugin for:

• Glass intensity (up to 30% past the AA-verified ceiling, labelled as such)
• Luminous field strength
• Glass blur, texture grain
• Window transparency (with the companion plugin below)
• Reading line width, body line height, compact density
• Hide tab bar / ribbon / status bar
• High contrast mode (with a command)

Going further: real window transparency

Out of the box, every platform gets the painted glass above. Obsidian currently ships a window-transparency regression (since 1.8.9) that blocks true see-through on macOS; two optional extras in this repo work around it:

• Isinglass Companion (companion/, a small plugin): keeps the window appearance in sync with your Obsidian theme so the OS material always matches, and applies the "Window transparency" slider for real whole-window see-through.
• macOS vibrancy patch (companion/patch-macos-vibrancy.mjs): restores true OS-blurred frost behind the window by fixing Obsidian's missing transparent window flag. One-line in-place patch, full backup, --revert included. Re-run after Obsidian updates. Use at your own discretion — it modifies the installed app.
• Windows: the Pseudo Mica plugin enables real Mica/Acrylic materials; Isinglass detects it and opens its surfaces automatically. No patch needed.

The theme detects a real material via Obsidian's own translucency state and re-balances itself: the painted field steps back and the genuine frost carries the glass.

Install

Until the theme is in the community gallery: copy manifest.json and theme.css into <your vault>/.obsidian/themes/Isinglass/, then select Isinglass under Settings → Appearance → Themes.

Development

npm install
npm run build   # sass -> theme.css, then contrast + budget verification
npm run watch

Edit the SCSS modules in src/, never theme.css. The build fails on any WCAG AA regression or budget overrun.

Licence

MIT