Settings & Themes

Time to turn ObsiKO into a workshop that's uniquely yours! From a single settings dialog, you can customize almost everything to your taste. 🎨

← Home: ObsiKO 101

Where was that setting again? 🔎

• With more than twenty groups of settings, there's a search box at the top. Type whatever comes to mind — font, dark, shortcut — and only the matching settings stay.
• It doesn't just match names: it also searches the "?" descriptions, the choices inside dropdowns, and group names. So a font name or a theme name finds the right row too.
• Pick a group from the category list on the left to see just that one, and go back with All anytime.
• Pressing Esc in the search box clears the search only (the dialog stays open). Press it again to close.

What should ObsiKO show at startup? 🚀

• Pick it in Settings ▸ Basics ▸ Startup screen — Continue where I left off (default, your previous tabs) · Today's note (created then if it doesn't exist, and the offer to bring over yesterday's unfinished tasks follows) · Dashboard · Graph view · Codex view · A specific note.
• Choose A specific note and a note list unfolds right below. Type a name or folder to narrow it down, then click.
• If you open a different vault and that note isn't there, ObsiKO quietly continues where you left off (and tells you why).

Stepping away for a moment: screen lock 🔒

• Turn on Settings ▸ Convenience ▸ Screen lock (biometrics/passcode) and a lock screen appears when you open the app and when you come back after more than a minute away. Perfect for leaving your table at a café.
• Creating a passcode, opening the app and turning the lock off all use the same big screen. When you create one, you type it twice on that one screen.
• Turning it off asks for your current passcode (or device authentication) — a lock you can switch off without proving anything isn't a lock.
• If your device supports it, Touch ID on Mac · Face ID / Touch ID on iPhone & iPad · fingerprint on Android unlocks instantly. On iPhone and Android you can also fall back to your device passcode (PIN/pattern), and failing that it asks for the passcode you made.
• ⚠️ The app passcode cannot be recovered if you forget it. Your note files stay as they are and remain readable in the folder.
• Want to lock the moment you stand up? Run Lock screen now from the command palette.
• ⚠️ This hides the screen — it does not encrypt your files. Your notes stay in the vault folder as ordinary Markdown, so it can't stop someone who opens your computer and reads the files directly. For truly sensitive material, pair it with your device's disk encryption (FileVault and the like).

The Magic of Day and Night: Theme Mode 🌗

• Choose a moody Dark mode, a bright Light mode, or System, which switches automatically to match your computer or phone's clock.
• Your theme also colors the first screen you see when the app opens, so a dark theme never flashes white on launch. With a preset, that screen uses the preset's own color, so it flows straight into your notes. (On iPhone and Android, the very first moment before the app starts still follows your device setting — the operating system draws that one, so the app cannot change it.)

One Click and Done: Color Presets 💅

• Don't want to fuss with details? Just pick one of ObsiKO's beautifully pre-tuned presets! (In particular, 'Cosmic Star' pairs perfectly with Graph View's space theme 🌌 → Graph View)
• Of course, for pickier tastes, we've also opened up fine-tuning of each individual color — background, text, highlight, and more!
• Three themes with heading effects ✨ — Golden (gold leaf on ebony: a dark brown-black background where gold headings lift off the page with a cream outline and soft shadow; body text in Gowun Batang) · Neon Sign (a night-street sign: purple-black background with hot-pink accents, cyan links, fluorescent-yellow highlighter, and headings that glow like sign bulbs; body text in NEXON Lv1 Gothic) · Ancient (an inscription cut in stone: faded limestone background, earthen accents, and deep-brown headings with a heavy shadow so they read as carved relief; body text in Gyeonggi Batang).
• Adding these made built-in themes able to carry heading effects (glow, outline, shadow) at all. Switch to a theme without them and they turn cleanly off, just like before. And the glow/outline/shadow in your own color presets now actually show up — until now the values were saved but nothing drew them.

Share the colors you crafted 🎁

• Press Export under Settings ▸ Theme ▸ Share color presets and all your saved color presets get packed into a single file (.oset). Move it to another device or gift it to a friend.
• Import just asks you to pick a file — it never overwrites your existing presets, adding the new ones alongside; on a name clash it appends (2) and keeps both.
• The file contains colors only. It has nothing to do with your notes or vault, so it's safe to hand to anyone.

Building a Writing Environment That Fits You ✍️

• Is the text too small? Do the lines feel cramped? Change the body font, size, and line spacing — plus the width the text fills and its alignment — however you like.
• Over 20 Korean-supporting fonts are bundled in! Pretendard, Maru Buri, Noto Sans/Serif KR, Nanum Square Neo, KoPubWorld Batang/Dotum, RIDIBatang, Seoul Hangang/Namsan, Gowun Dodum/Batang, S-Core Dream, NEXON Lv1 Gothic, Gyeonggi Batang, MapoFlowerIsland — plus the monospaced D2Coding for code and the game-flavored Galmuri (pixel). If you love that pixel vibe, try pairing it with the 'Pangyo Midnight' preset. 🕹️
• Fonts are downloaded when you pick them 📥: to keep the app light only three ship inside, and the rest fetch the first time you choose them (after that they stay on your device and work offline). So you only need the internet once per font — and if it fails, it simply falls back to your previous font, so nothing breaks.
• Don't see the font you want? You can load fonts installed on your device or import a font file (.ttf) directly (this varies a little by platform). → Platform Guide
• There are also 3 diagram (Mermaid) styles to choose from — classic, neo, and handDrawn! → Advanced Markdown

Tools for Deeper Focus While Writing 🧘

• Typewriter scrolling: Turn it on and the line you're currently writing always stays centered on screen. Write on comfortably without having to look down!
• Smart quotes: Automatically converts straight quotes into context-appropriate curly quotes (‘ ’ “ ”) as you type (on by default). If you'd rather stick with straight quotes, turn it off here. → Markdown Basics
• Vim mode: If you're used to Vim keybindings, try turning this on. (It's loaded only when needed, so the app stays light the rest of the time.)
• Today's note folder: Set the folder for today's / this week's / this month's notes (2026-06-28.md · 2026-08-17 Week.md · 2026-08.md) — shared by all three, blank = vault root. Weekly and monthly templates are set separately; leave them empty and you get just the date as a heading. → Calendar
• Today's note title format: Choose the date shape used for the file name of today's note (default 2026-08-29). Pick a preset or type your own — the resulting file name is previewed right below. Existing notes are never renamed, and the calendar still recognises the old names. → Calendar
• Today's note template: Choose the template used for today's note. Click the field and the notes in your template folder drop down as a list — just pick one (kept elsewhere? type a name and it searches the whole vault). Leave it empty for just the date heading. → Calendar
• Writing reminder: Get a “Time to write today's note” reminder on the days and time you choose; tap it to open today's note (or this week's note / review cards). On phones it arrives even when the app is closed; on computers and the web, only while ObsiKO is open. → Calendar
• Mobile formatting button: On phones and tablets, choose whether the formatting button above the keyboard is Off / Auto / Always. → Platform Guide

AI Agent Settings Have Moved into the Panel 🐙

AI-related settings live in the options (≡) button in the AI Agent panel header, not in the settings dialog. Here's what you can turn on there.

• Get answers as .md · Token optimization · Detailed completion report (a wrap-up of what changed and why)
• Auto-capture personal memory · Save raw conversation log — let the AI remember your taste and context long-term, and keep the raw transcript in your vault. → Personal Memory
• Loops (collapsible) — self-verification · completion gate · critic · iteration limit · picking the critic engine
• Collaboration (collapsible) — Ask another engine · Parallel drafts (gather answers from several engines and synthesize) · Parallel delegation (split the work and run it at once)
• Git (collapsible) — auto-commit · remote repo · push, and creating a GitHub repository, all in one place
• Semantic (collapsible) — the embedding backend and model for semantic search
• Every other AI option, like the Codex tool connection, lives here too. → AI Agent

💡 Some items only appear on desktop (the Git and CLI-engine ones). On phones and the web you'll only see what that device can actually use.

(Desktop Only) Letting Another AI App Read Your Vault 🔌

Want to tell another AI app — the Claude desktop app, say — "go look through my notes"? Turn on 'External AI apps'.

• Switch it on and per-app connection cards appear. For Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, Antigravity, Claude Code, and the Codex CLI it's one click on [Connect] — then just quit that app completely and reopen it. (If an app isn't installed you'll see 'Not installed' with a download link, and a [Disconnect] button sits in the same spot when you're done.) 🪟 The Microsoft Store and Mac App Store builds hide apps that aren't installed — they can't point you to downloads outside the Store. Apps you already have still show [Connect] as usual.
• For any app not in the list, unfold 'Connect another app manually (advanced)' below the cards and paste the config snippet into that app's MCP settings.
• Reading only. Only search-and-read tools are exposed — there is no writing or deleting at all. The other app can read a found note all the way through (long notes in parts), and clicking an 'Open in ObsiKO' link in its answer opens that note in ObsiKO — in the right window even with several vaults open. The example questions under the cards are a good place to start. It also shares the semantic search index ObsiKO has already built, so "find notes about something like this" works instantly in the other app too. Very large notes (a tens-of-MB log, say) are streamed with no size cap, so they can be searched and read to the end (only the amount shown at once is split).
• You choose which vaults to open up. Turning this on shows an Vaults opened to external apps list. From the window holding the vault you want, press [Open this window's vault] and it joins the list (name it whatever you like). Moving between windows never changes the list — it won't quietly follow whichever window you're looking at.
• You can open several vaults (up to 3). Each one appears separately in the other app, so a single conversation can do "find it in Work and write it up in Novel". The cap of 3 exists because the tool list grows with each vault, which makes the other app harder to use.
• The switch on a row pauses one vault; [Remove] also cleans up the entries in apps you connected. The big switch at the top turns everything off at once (the list stays) and restores it when you turn it back on.
• If you move or rename a vault, it stops being readable for a moment — open it again in ObsiKO and press [Connect] once more. 👍
• It's off by default. Turn it on only when you need it.

🔒 Turning it off really does cut the connection. It doesn't matter if the old config is still sitting in the other app — the side that accepts the connection checks this switch every time it starts, and even an already-running connection refuses the very next request once you switch it off, and cuts itself off within seconds. of you flipping the switch.

That said, 'read-only' means your notes can't be changed — not that they stay secret. The other app does whatever it likes with what it reads. If there are notes you want hidden, mark them ahead of time. → AI Sources & Privacy

Perfecting Your Writing: Dictionary & Spell Check 📖

• From entering an API key for the smarter National Institute of Korean Language Urimalsaem dictionary, to registering your own spell-check exception words — these are the settings for perfecting your Korean. → Korean Writing Tools

AI Voice (Read Aloud) Settings 🔊

• No setup needed just to listen — 'Read Note Aloud' in the command palette plays instantly with your device voice (free). The settings below are for creating audio files (AI narration); a Gemini key also works on its free quota.
• Device voices are picked on the playback bar, not here (only voices installed for that language show up). To get more of them, download them in your device's system settings — Mac/iPhone: Accessibility ▸ Spoken Content ▸ Voices; Android: Settings ▸ Accessibility ▸ Text-to-speech ▸ voice data. They appear in the list after you restart the app. The ? on the playback bar says the same thing (for the device you're on).
• You can set the default voice for AI read-aloud, per provider (OpenAI, Gemini). Separate from switching it on the fly in the playback bar, the voice you pick here becomes the default. → AI Agent
• Precise read-aloud highlight sync: Matches the 'highlight the sentence being read' feature exactly to per-sentence timestamps (uses a Whisper re-transcription — requires an OpenAI key, at extra cost). It's fine to leave this off most of the time, since the default sync tracks along pretty well anyway.

In a Language You're Comfortable With (UI Language) 🌐

• More comfortable in Korean, or English, or Japanese? Switch to whichever language suits you, anytime!

Shortcut Settings for Keyboard Ninjas ⌨️

• The default shortcuts don't feel natural to you? No worries! Just press and hold your preferred key combo (to record it), and you can change absolutely everything to your liking. → For details, see Keyboard Shortcuts

📋 What Else Is in the Settings Dialog? (The Full List)

The settings dialog is split into collapsible sections — click a heading to expand it. Here's a sweep through everything, including what we haven't covered above.

Bringing notes over from another app 📦

Settings ▸ Import offers seven of them. If you're just starting, you can also tap Import from another app on the welcome screen — pick the app, and you'll see a line or two on how to export from it, then choose the file or folder right there.

Every import creates a new folder inside your vault, so the notes you already have are never touched. Import the same thing twice and you simply get another folder (like Bear 2) — nothing is overwritten. If no vault is open yet, your default storage opens after you pick the file and the notes go there. (For a very large export — over 20,000 files or 2 GB in total — please split it up.)

• Notion — export from Notion as Markdown & CSV and drop the ZIP in. We strip the UUID off each file name, turn internal links into [[wikilinks]], and convert database CSVs into tables.
• Evernote — drop in the .enex Evernote gives you. An .enex isn't a folder: it's a single XML file holding notes and attachments together, so it can't be read as-is and must go through this conversion. Body text, attached images, tags, creation dates and source URLs all come across, and task checkboxes survive too. (Parts you locked/encrypted in Evernote can't be brought over — we tell you how many were skipped.)
• Bear — in Bear, export as Markdown, then zip that folder and drop it in. Bear keeps notes in its own database, so there's no .md folder for ObsiKO to open until you export once. The export is mostly readable as-is; the import only fixes the three notations Bear uses differently: ::highlight:: → ==highlight==, ~strikethrough~ → ~~strikethrough~~ (a single tilde means subscript in ObsiKO, which would silently change the meaning), and #multi word# → #multi-word. Nested tags like #parent/child already work and are left alone, as are your attachment folders, headings, and anything inside code blocks (so std::vector doesn't turn into a highlight 😄).
• Logseq · Roam Research — for both, export as Markdown and drop the ZIP in. Outliner-specific notation is rewritten into ObsiKO's: TODO / LATER become [ ], DOING / NOW become [/], DONE becomes [x]; key:: value properties at the top of a note move into frontmatter; {{embed [[note]]}} becomes an ![[note]] embed; and #[[multi word tag]] becomes [[multi word tag]]. Journal files (2026_08_05.md) are renamed to match today's notes: 2026-08-05.md.
• Nested bullets are left exactly as they are — that structure is information you brought from the outliner. ((block refs)) are kept too, and we tell you how many there were at the end.
• Only .md export ZIPs are supported. Roam's JSON/EDN backups and Logseq's DB graphs are a different format altogether, so they're out of scope.
• Markdown files · another app's vault — for an Obsidian vault or any folder of .md files, pick the whole folder (desktop, Chrome, recent Safari) or zip it up and drop it in. The contents are copied byte for byte; only settings and clutter like .obsidian, .DS_Store and __MACOSX are left out. If your vault already has a note with the same name, we add the new folder's name to just those links, so an imported [[link]] never points at the wrong note.
• Apple Notes — drop in the folder you exported from Notes (or a ZIP of it). It's copied as-is, just like Markdown files.

💡 Sections your device can't use simply don't appear (e.g. 'System integration' is Android-only; 'External AI apps' and 'Web Clipper' are desktop-only). Nothing's broken if you don't see one! 😌

← Previous: Trash · Home · Next: Keyboard Shortcuts →

Quiet safeguards 🔐

• Show internet images automatically (Settings ▸ Editor): decides whether images added by an internet address load as soon as you open a note. When it is off they load only when you tap them, and until then no request reaches that image server at all — so nobody else's server can tell when you opened a note. Images stored inside the vault are unaffected. On by default.
• (Browser version) AI keys are stored inside this browser as they are. Tick “Don't remember in this browser” next to the key field and the key is erased when you close the tab — always tick it on a shared computer.
• (Browser version) Clear this browser's app data (Settings ▸ below Dictionary): wipes the settings, search index, version history, API keys and connections the browser version left here, then restarts the app. Notes in your vault folder are not deleted. Use it when you walk away from a shared computer. → Platform Guide

Sync between devices — keep it on your GitHub 🔄

Settings ▸ Sync between devices keeps a vault in a private repository in your own GitHub account and matches it across your devices. There is no ObsiKO server; your notes live only on GitHub. It uses the same GitHub account you connected for web sharing (no account yet? You can create one for free in the approval window).

• First device — press “Keep this vault on GitHub”; an explanation unfolds, and a second press goes through GitHub approval (paste the code), creates one private repository and uploads the vault.
• Other devices — “Get a vault from another device…” lists the vaults kept on GitHub; picking one matches it with the vault open now. Same notes are merged, differing ones are kept as two copies.
• After that it syncs automatically when you open the vault, shortly after saving, when you return to the app, and every 2 minutes while it is open (you can turn this off). Click “Synced · 3m ago” on the right of the status bar to sync now. Nothing runs while the app is closed.
• If the same note was edited on both sides, different lines are merged; the same line keeps yours and leaves theirs as a copy next to it, and you get a notice (“Keep mine” / “Take theirs”). Deleted notes go to the trash on the other device.
• “Turn off” only disconnects this device. The GitHub repository and the vault files stay. App records (the .obsiko folder — bookmarks, reading positions, routines) stay per device by default, but “Also sync app records” moves them too (received records appear after reopening the app).
• ⚠️ AI memories and raw chat logs always go up, whatever that option says. They live in _ObsiKO/memory and _ObsiKO/chats as ordinary notes, so they are treated like everything else in the vault. If you would rather not upload them, move that folder out of the vault or turn the logging off. → Personal Memory
• What never goes up: the .obsidian, .trash, .git and node_modules folders, system files like .DS_Store, any file over 50MB, and the README.md at the top of the vault (that one describes the repository, so it isn't treated as a note).
• If a great many files changed at once, GitHub's hourly limit can be reached. Sync doesn't stop: it uploads what it can and tells you “{n} files will follow in {min} min”, then finishes on its own once the limit resets.
• It stops before it deletes. A brief failure to read GitHub used to look like “the other device deleted everything”, so ObsiKO now tells “could not read” apart from “really empty”. If it cannot read, it deletes nothing and simply stops (the same guard applies in the other direction).
• If several files are about to go, it asks first. A card appears in Settings ▸ Sync between devices with “Keep both, delete nothing” or “Delete anyway” (automatic syncing rests until you choose). Deletions only ever move files to the trash — if they cannot go to the trash, sync stops instead. → Trash

⚠️ By GitHub rules this approval also grants access to your other private repositories (ObsiKO only touches the one it made). The Git item in the AI agent options above (auto-commit · push) is a separate feature.

🌐 The browser version does not offer sync between devices — so that a token with repository access is never kept inside a browser. Turn sync on in the desktop or phone app instead (the browser's settings only show this note). Sharing to the web still works in the browser. → Platform Guide