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Bureau

by sonophage
Screenshot of the Bureau Obsidian theme
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Code

Description

This theme supports Dark Mode

README file from

Github

Bureau

A dark, noir-bureau theme for Obsidian — a worn case-file on a concrete desk, wired to a humming CRT terminal.

Its mood is stitched from three places:

  • Control — the austere institutional dread of the Federal Bureau of Control (the default red accent).
  • The Magnus Archives — dusty archives and quiet wrongness (the green accent, Magnus).
  • Deus Ex — black-and-gold cyber-renaissance (the gold accent, Deus).

screenshot

Dark-only. Every texture is procedural SVG (no embedded images), the whole UI reads from a single accent colour, and there's an optional CRT layer — scanlines, phosphor glow, a flickering scan line, a power-on when you open a note.

Install

Community themes: Settings → Appearance → Manage → search Bureau.

Manual:

  1. Download theme.css and manifest.json.
  2. Drop them into <vault>/.obsidian/themes/Bureau/.
  3. Settings → Appearance → Themes → Bureau.

Install the Style Settings plugin. Everything below lives there, under one Bureau panel.

Controls

All controls are in Settings → Style Settings → Bureau. The panel preserves your choices — switching presets never overwrites them.

Mode

A quick preset that layers over everything else:

Mode Result
Low Base styling only — no textures, glow, CRT, or motion
Medium Textures + ambient glow; no CRT or animation
High Everything on
Custom Use the individual toggles below (your saved settings)

Color & accent

  • Accent preset — Control (red) · Magnus (green) · Deus (gold) · Custom. The one colour the whole UI, glow, and highlights read from.
  • Custom accent — your own colour, used when the preset is Custom.

Atmosphere

  • Glow intensity / reach — the accent glow rising from the bottom of the window.
  • Film grain (+ intensity) — fine grain over the whole window.
  • Sidebar texture (+ strength) — concrete grain on the panels behind the cards.
  • Vignette (+ amount) — darkened window edges.

CRT

  • CRT scanlines (+ spacing) — faint horizontal lines over the editor.
  • CRT text glow (+ brightness) — phosphor bloom on body text.
  • Typewriter tooltips — tooltips type in character by character.
  • Fullscreen CRT mode — in fullscreen, a curved tube vignette, amped scanlines/glow, and chrome that recedes until hover.
  • Focus line (+ dim amount) — dims every editor line but the one you're on, with an accent edge marker.

Cards & layout

  • Cards layout — float every pane as a bordered card on a dark desk.
  • Card gap / rounding / shadow darkness.

Tabs

  • Tab shape — Folder (connected file-folder tabs) or Pill (fully rounded).
  • Main / Left sidebar / Right sidebar tab content — Icons · Labels · Icons + Labels.
  • Pinned tabs → icon only.

Hide / Focus

  • Focus Mode — hides the tab bar, window buttons, and status bar at once. Bind a hotkey to Style Settings → Toggle Focus Mode.
  • À-la-carte: hide the status bar, breadcrumbs, tab close button, left/right sidebar toggles, folder collapse arrow, command-palette instructions.

Animation

Restrained and CRT-flavoured — eased, never bouncy. A master Animations toggle gates everything, with a speed slider (400–1000 ms; hover/state runs snappier).

  • CRT power-on — content fades in from black when a note/pane opens.
  • Channel-change crossfade — fade-from-black + scan-line wipe on note switch.
  • Boot scan-sweep — a bright line wipes down once at launch.
  • Scanning line — a faint white line scans slowly down the editor and glitches like a loose wire (sliders for brightness, glitch interval, and glitch depth).
  • Breathe the ambient glow, ease the phosphor glow, fade menus & modals.
  • Terminal block caret, hover bloom (accent glow on hover), active-line scan, CRT flicker, CRT loading throbber, eased checkbox tick.
  • MOBILE — disable animations.

Daily notes

Per-weekday colour schemes (Sun–Sat), each with its own accent, text, and background. Add the cssclass: daily (or a weekday class) to a note to key its palette. Disable the old "Daily Note Themes" snippet — Bureau owns this.

Credits

Bureau borrows ideas, gratefully, from:

  • blobob — the hiding/focus options, the animation principles, and the tab styling approach.
  • Daily Notes (CyanVoxel's Daily Note Themes) — the per-weekday colour-scheme idea.
  • Elysian — styling inspiration.
  • Minimalist Paradise — styling inspiration.

Fonts (loaded via Google Fonts, with system fallbacks): Urbanist and Courier Prime, both OFL.

Development

The theme is a single theme.css. Edit it and reload Obsidian (hard-reload, or toggle the theme off/on — Obsidian caches theme.css). Retheme from the .theme-dark token block at the top; the Style Settings config lives in the @settings block at the foot.

License

MIT

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