Bumblebee

A warm, high-contrast theme for Obsidian — near-black backgrounds, an amber accent, and a distinct red for emphasis. Ships with both dark and light modes.

Features

• Dark and light modes. Dark is the primary design target; light mode uses darker accent variants to meet WCAG AA contrast on white.
• Amber accent, red emphasis. The accent (amber) is reserved for interactive elements — links, checkboxes, selection. Bold text gets a dedicated red so "important" never reads as "clickable".
• Code syntax highlighting tuned for the palette, with distinct colors for keywords, functions, strings, properties, numbers, and comments.
• Style Settings support. Install the Style Settings plugin to toggle header underlines, set per-header colors, and switch Kanban layout options.
• Kanban styling for the Kanban plugin.

Installation

From the community themes (recommended)

1. Open Settings → Appearance → Themes → Manage.
2. Search for Bumblebee and click Install and use.

Manual

1. Create a folder Bumblebee in your vault's .obsidian/themes/ directory.
2. Download manifest.json and theme.css from the latest release into that folder.
3. Enable it under Settings → Appearance → Themes.

Customization

With the Style Settings plugin enabled, open Settings → Style Settings → Bumblebee to adjust header underlines, header colors, and Kanban layout.

Development

Bumblebee is a single-file CSS theme — theme.css is the artefact, no build step.

Local iteration. Symlink the repo into a vault's themes folder, then enable Bumblebee under Settings → Appearance → Themes. Because the theme is symlinked, Obsidian's CSS cache won't pick up edits automatically — toggle the theme in Settings → Appearance, or restart Obsidian, to load fresh CSS:

TARGET="/path/to/vault/.obsidian/themes/Bumblebee"
rm -rf "$TARGET" && ln -s "$(pwd)" "$TARGET"

The rm -rf is needed if Bumblebee was previously installed from the community themes browser — ln -sfn alone leaves the existing real directory in place and silently creates a nested symlink inside it.

Releasing. Bump the version field in manifest.json, commit, then push a bare-semver tag:

git tag 1.0.2 && git push origin main 1.0.2

The workflow at .github/workflows/release.yml asserts the tag matches manifest.json, then publishes a GitHub Release with manifest.json and theme.css attached. Tags must be bare semver — no v prefix — as required by Obsidian's community-themes index.

Design decisions live in CONTEXT.md and docs/adr/.

Credits

Bumblebee is a recolor of GitHub Theme by @krios2146, used under the MIT License. The structural CSS and Style Settings scaffolding are derived from that theme; the Bumblebee palette and the design decisions behind it are documented in CONTEXT.md and docs/adr/.

License

MIT. Copyright © 2023 Vladimir Kidyaev (original theme) and © 2026 KulySocc (recolor).