Monokai Pro (CE) for Minimal Theme

Monokai Pro colours for Minimal Theme, as CSS snippets. Light and dark, plus an optional layer that colour-codes emphasis.

Colours only. Nothing here changes layout, fonts, spacing or behaviour — Minimal and Minimal Theme Settings work exactly as they did, and you keep updating both from the community catalogue.

Install

1. Download minimal-monokai-pro-ce.css, and minimal-monokai-pro-ce-em.css if you want the emphasis colouring.
2. Drop them in <your vault>/.obsidian/snippets/.
3. Settings → Appearance → CSS snippets → reload, then toggle them on.

Or from the vault root:

mkdir -p .obsidian/snippets
curl -L -o .obsidian/snippets/minimal-monokai-pro-ce.css \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rockad/obsidian-minimal-monokai/main/snippets/minimal-monokai-pro-ce.css
curl -L -o .obsidian/snippets/minimal-monokai-pro-ce-em.css \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rockad/obsidian-minimal-monokai/main/snippets/minimal-monokai-pro-ce-em.css

Requires the Minimal theme. Minimal Theme Settings is not required, but is what gives you the background-contrast options these snippets support.

What you get

Snippet	Effect
minimal-monokai-pro-ce.css	The Monokai Pro palette in light and dark, including all four light and three dark background-contrast variants
minimal-monokai-pro-ce-em.css	Bold, italic, underline, highlight and strikethrough each get their own accent

The palette overrides whichever colour scheme is selected in Minimal Theme Settings, so you do not need to change that setting — turn the snippet off and your previous scheme is back.

Light mode uses the official Monokai Pro Light palette. Minimal needs eight accent colours and Monokai defines six, so --color-blue and --color-pink are derived by hue-rotating the palette's own cyan and red within its saturation and lightness band, keeping them in family.

Only the default filter

Monokai publishes several filters — Octagon, Machine, Ristretto, Spectrum — but the community edition terms permit a CE release to include only the default Monokai Pro filter, so that is all this repo distributes.

The others are straightforward to run locally: copy minimal-monokai-pro-ce.css, replace the hex values with the filter you want, and keep it in your own vault. That is personal use of a palette rather than redistribution. Please don't publish one.

Fonts

Not included, and not required — but Minimal is designed against Inter for the interface, Lato in the editor and JetBrains Mono for code, set in Settings → Appearance → Font.

sudo apt install fonts-inter fonts-lato fonts-jetbrains-mono   # Debian/Ubuntu
brew install --cask font-inter font-lato font-jetbrains-mono   # macOS
choco install inter lato jetbrainsmono                         # Windows

Why snippets and not a plugin

A plugin cannot add entries to Minimal Theme Settings' colour scheme dropdown — that list is hardcoded in its source, so the only way in is to fork the whole plugin and then keep the fork in step with upstream. A separate plugin would have to ship its own settings UI and its own body class management to do what one stylesheet does here.

Snippets have no version to track, no manifest.json, no plugin id to collide with the official Minimal Theme Settings, and they keep working across Obsidian and Minimal updates.

The selectors repeat the theme class (body.theme-dark.theme-dark) to outrank Minimal's own scheme rules, which use two classes. NOTES.md covers that and the rest of Minimal's colour system, including how to derive another Monokai filter for your own vault.

Licence

The CSS in this repository is MIT.

The colour values are © Monokai and are reproduced under the Monokai Pro contribution guide, which permits a community edition when it is free, non-commercial and open source, and limits it to the default filter. Monokai reserves the right to take over the package. This is an unofficial community edition and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Monokai.

Minimal Theme is © Steph Ango under MIT.