Nous (νοῦς, mind / intellect) turns an Obsidian vault into a scholar's notebook: a parchment-toned canvas, a medium-weight serif headline voice, booktabs tables, and theorem-like callouts — all drawing from the same warm editorial palette.

Preview

Install

Community store (recommended)

Obsidian → Settings → Appearance → Themes → Manage → search Nous → Install → Use.
You'll get automatic updates whenever a new version is released.

If you don't see Nous yet, the community PR may still be in review — use the manual path below in the meantime.

Manual

Download theme.css and manifest.json from the latest release.
Put them in YourVault/.obsidian/themes/Nous/.
Obsidian → Settings → Appearance → Themes → Nous.

Features

Warm palette — parchment #fdfcf9 canvas, terracotta #a8553a accent, every gray carries a yellow-brown undertone, no cool blue-grays anywhere
Serif body in edit and reading view — EB Garamond / Crimson Pro / Songti SC, so you write on paper, not in a chat box
LaTeX booktabs tables — top & bottom 2px rules, 1px mid rule, no verticals, small-caps header row
Theorem-style callouts — 13+ built-in types plus custom [!theorem] / [!lemma] / [!proposition] / [!corollary] / [!proof] / [!definition] / [!remark] / [!example]; [!proof] auto-appends ∎
Mermaid in warm palette — flowchart / sequence / state / class / gantt / pie / ER diagrams all recolored
Light & dark, both warm — near-black #15140f dark variant keeps the same warm-tone discipline
Ring shadows over drop shadows — depth via inset / 1px rings in warm grays
Content typography — small-caps at H5 / H6, italic at H4, tight display letter-spacing on the inline title, old-style figures in body text with tabular lining figures in tables

Optional snippets

Drop the contents of snippets/ (also in the snippets.zip release asset) into YourVault/.obsidian/snippets/ and enable each in Settings → Appearance → CSS snippets.

Snippet	What it does
`nous-theorem-counters.css`	Auto-number `theorem` / `lemma` / `proposition` / `corollary` callouts amsthm-style
`nous-classical-figures.css`	OpenType old-style figures in body; tabular lining figures in tables

Style Settings integration

If you have the Style Settings community plugin installed, Nous exposes controls for:

Serif heading / body font
Sans UI font
Monospace font
Body text size
Body line height
Reading column width
Toggle: justified body
Toggle: numbered headings (§ 1.1.1)
Toggle: drop-cap first paragraph
Toggle: disable small-caps H5 / H6

Font stack and credits

Nous loads via Google Fonts. If you're offline or prefer different faces, set your own via Style Settings.

EB Garamond — Georg Duffner (body + headline serif)
Crimson Pro — Sebastian Kosch (alternate serif)
Cormorant Garamond — Christian Thalmann (display headings)
Inter — Rasmus Andersson (UI sans)
JetBrains Mono — JetBrains (code)
Songti SC / Kaiti SC — macOS system (Chinese)

Roadmap

1.0.0 is the first stable release — daily-driver-ready, palette locked, variable names stable. Post-1.0 work will focus on:

Fuller coverage of third-party plugin UIs (Kanban, Advanced Tables, Excalidraw, Canvas)
Accessibility audits and high-contrast variants

File issues with screenshots and the offending element's selector (Cmd+Option+I → Inspect) if you hit something.

Acknowledgments

The LaTeX / booktabs tradition — the rule system, theorem environments, and §-numbered section conventions are lifted from decades of academic typesetting practice.
Obsidian community — for the Style Settings plugin that makes user-facing controls possible.

Nous

Description

README file from