Neonflux

Neonflux

An Obsidian theme. Neon on near-black, machined edges, Orbitron headings over a >_ prompt. Light mode included and not an afterthought.

Palette shared with @laddtnov/cyberpunk-ui.

What it is

A neon-on-near-black theme for people who read in Obsidian for hours, built so the aesthetic does not cost legibility:

• Accents stay on short strings. Headings, links, chrome, code tokens. Body text is a calm near-white — neon is a poster palette, not a reading palette.
• Glow never touches text you read. Only h1 and h2 carry it. A text-shadow under a paragraph is a legibility bug in costume.
• Light mode is not an afterthought. The neon hues are unusable on white (cyan measures about 1.2:1), so they are replaced with dimmed equivalents that clear WCAG AA.
• Contrast is enforced, not asserted. A checker runs over both themes and fails the build on regression, holding muted text and syntax colours to the 4.5:1 text floor rather than the 3.0 non-text one.
• Six fonts embedded, Latin and Cyrillic. Nothing is fetched at launch.
• Zero JavaScript. Built by remapping Obsidian's own design tokens, so it reaches plugins and survives app updates.

Install

Settings → Appearance → Themes → Manage → search "Neonflux".

Or from the web: community.obsidian.md/themes/neonflux.

Download theme.css and manifest.json from the latest release and put both in YourVault/.obsidian/themes/Neonflux/.

To run an unreleased build from source:

git clone https://github.com/laddtnov/Neonflux
cd Neonflux
npm run build
scripts/install-dev.sh /path/to/your/vault

Development

src/theme.css is the file a human edits. theme.css at the repo root is a build artifact — fonts prepended to the source — and is what Obsidian loads.

npm run build           # src/theme.css + fonts -> theme.css
npm run check:contrast  # WCAG check, both themes
npm run dev             # build, then install into demo-vault/
npm run build:fonts     # re-download and re-inline the fonts (rarely needed)
npm run release 0.2.0   # bump, verify, tag, publish

Releasing

Use npm run release, not npm version. The tag must equal the manifest.json version exactly, with no v prefix. Obsidian's community theme bot installs assets from the release whose tag matches the manifest, and rejects v0.1.0 against a manifest saying 0.1.0 with "No release matches your manifest version". The sibling cyberpunk-ui repo uses npm version, which tags with a v — carrying that habit here breaks the listing, which is exactly why this repo has its own script.

The script refuses to publish if the branch isn't main, the tag already exists, the tree is dirty, local and origin have diverged, the contrast check fails, or theme.css is stale relative to its sources. Release notes come from docs/release-notes/<version>.md if present, otherwise from the commits.

demo-vault/ is a throwaway vault whose single note exercises every surface the theme touches. Open it in Obsidian and reload with Cmd-R after a build.

How it is built

Almost entirely by remapping Obsidian's own design tokens rather than overriding its rules. Token remapping survives app updates and reaches community plugins for free; rule overrides break on both counts. The handful of real rules each carry a comment explaining why a token could not do the job.

Setting --accent-h/s/l and the --color-base-* ramp is what makes the theme reach surfaces no rule here mentions — sliders, toggles, callouts, the graph.

Fonts

Six faces are embedded as base64 woff2, not linked from a CDN. Obsidian is offline-first: a theme that fetches fonts on every launch leaks the user's IP to a third party and stalls startup without a connection.

The three Latin faces have no Cyrillic at all, so each is paired with a companion chosen to match its character. Font fallback is per-glyph, so the stacks alone do the work — no unicode-range rules, no JavaScript. The companions ship their Cyrillic subsets only, so no Latin glyph is embedded twice.

Only the base latin and cyrillic subsets are embedded. The -ext subsets were another 64KB — Church Slavonic and historic letterforms on one side, Central-European and Turkish diacritics on the other — against a 18KB stylesheet, which is what put theme.css past the size Obsidian's review is happy with. The trade is narrow and per-glyph: a Polish ł or a Czech ř takes the system UI font, the rest of the word stays in Rajdhani.

All six are SIL Open Font License 1.1, which permits this redistribution. Licence text in fonts/OFL.txt.

Accessibility

Contrast is enforced by scripts/check-contrast.js, with floors stricter than the sibling CSS kit uses: muted text and syntax colours are held to 4.5:1, not 3.0, because a note-taking app is read for hours and a code comment is text somebody parses.

ACCESSIBILITY.md records what passes, what was fixed, and — more usefully — the three known problems that remain, including the Cyrillic gap and the screen-reader announcement of the >_ prompt.

Licence

Two licences, because theme.css is a combined work.

The theme — everything in src/, scripts/, and the documentation — is MIT. See LICENSE.

The six embedded fonts are SIL Open Font License 1.1, which is what permits bundling them here. The OFL is not MIT: notably it forbids selling the fonts on their own, and it requires the copyright notices to travel with the font data. Those notices are reproduced in full at the top of the built theme.css — not merely linked — because Obsidian installs theme.css and manifest.json alone, so a link would leave every installed copy carrying font binaries with no notice attached. The complete licence text is in fonts/OFL.txt and ships as an asset on every release.

The woff2 files are Google Fonts' subsets, redistributed unmodified and under their original family names.

Obsidian is a trademark of Dynalist Inc. This theme is not affiliated with or endorsed by them; the name is used only to say what the theme is for.