Chisel

A chisel is a wedged hand tool or a snippet with a characteristically shaped cutting edge of blade on its end for carving or cutting a hard material (e.g. wood, stone, or Obsidian)

Cut the story, make it to the setup part ↓

Following on the manifesto File over app — Steph Ango I started feeling the same about functionality and visual possibility within obsidian. I have full confidence over the core team but I use a lot of enchantement over obsidian and some sadly are not maintained anymore.

There is so great feature being added to obsidian by the theme and it is all made by manipulating the The css note wich is exactly what the purpose of a snippet is in obsidian. There is a whole community of people sharing libraries of snippets.

Basically, you could encapsulate a whole theme inside a snippet. That means that all the awesome feature like image grid and active line can be wrote inside a snippet.

When you team up the wonderful Style Setting setting plugin and snippet offer us an amazing opportunity to expands the visual possibility of obsidian using the latest The css note technology.

Chisel is the Swiss knives, the jack of all trade when it comes to shapes your preferred note taking tool to your liking.

Base on the fact that the environment we are in affect our mood and so, the final product we are creating. I needed to be able to change my workspace depending on what I’m working on.

With all that said, I not only want to share this little gem, but also document the code inside it so you could actually create and modify it yourself. CSS being only a set of declaration, it is easy enough for anyone to feel empowered by chiseling their own environment.

Since it’s a snippet, it live on its own on top of any theme you use. That means that what you change will stay even if you change your theme. Even the color you set will override those specified in any theme.

Personally I like the layout and spacing of the minimal them by kepano but Chisel should complement any theme without struggle.

I used to be but I’m not a developer anymore so there might be some code that could be better. This little project is in GitHub so you can help to add feature and make sure that this little gem lives on.

Your digital workshop

This snippet is based on the use of the plugin style setting wich as an amazing export feature. Since the chisel can carve all your need from the layout to the color, you can practically create your own theme, save it and share with your fellow carver.

The tools

Since these are mostly modification based on css classes, you can specify each tool inside the cssclasses frontmater.

You can for example add justify, indent in the cssclasses property in a note to get a book reading experience without affecting the rest of your vault.

Carve out, carve in, make it your own experience.

Workspace

Tools to help in your general workspace.

The whole app is based on a palette of 10 colors that is easily change using css.
Here you can enabled the snippet to have super color power and then you get to chose all those color for you own pleasure.
There is also an expérimental funky mode if you feel adventurous.

Typography

The art of Typography will make or break your willingness to put hours of work into your much loved vault.

Invisible transclusion

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Funky Area

1. Download chisel.css from this repo.
2. Open the settings panel in Obsidian and click the Appearance tab.
3. Scroll to “CSS snippets” and click the folder icon.
4. Drop chisel.css into the folder that appears.
5. Now back in Obsidian, next to “CSS snippets”, click the “Reload snippets” button.
6. You should now see chisel in the list. Toggle it on and you’re ready to go!
7. but nothing as change…
8. Explore your new settings inside the setting panel.

Bonus

Since we are here, I’ve added two extra snippet in the toolbox.

• zeink.css
  transform the interface in black and white for a pleasurable experience on eink devices.
  awd
• chisel-theme.css
  A case study to go a bit further and put tree theme inside a snippet.Four theme complied for your pleasuse, you can access them by putting one of their name inside a cssclasses declaration just like so:

  ---
  cssclasses: serif
  ---

• sans
  The one that can go with any topic. The grand master of stoicism and unopionned. Easy on the eye yet powerful enough to keep you writing. A great pleasure to use at work.
• mono
  The Underdog. If you feel to go
• serif

Sources & Thanks

Ceciliamay

I could have not done anything if it was not from the inspiration from her primary theme, what got me started is when I simply wanted to retain that after being scared about the fact that she may not update it anymore. Than I kind of converted her theme as a snippet and there it snapped. Chisel the snippet was born. The yellow in her color palet is succulent. That’s why it’s the one bound onto the funky color theme.

Forrest font from Fenotype.

What can I say, that font alone make the web site alive. In mix with Cecil color it comes alive. A wonderful mix of vintage chill with a breath of fresh wood cabin air. Sadly not a variable font I would have love seeing it with the optical size feature but yet, I love both writing and reading that font.

Inter font family

Fraunces by Undercase Type

Obsidian-minimal by Kepano

Feedback

If you run into any issues or have suggestions feel free to submit a GitHub issue or send me a message @zremboldt on Twitter. I’ll respond as soon as I can. 👍