Themes and Display

Themes

Run Deckard: Choose Theme…, or choose Theme… under Appearance in a page’s ⋯, at its top right. Moving through the list previews each theme on the open pages; Enter keeps it, and Escape goes back. The setting is deckard.theme.

• Mimic, the default, takes its colors and fonts from your VS Code theme, light or dark, so Deckard’s pages look like the rest of your editor.
• Corpo is Mimic’s plain look in VS Code’s own default colors, whichever color theme you use: Dark 2026 while your theme is dark, and Light 2026 while it is light. Pick it when your color theme is busy, or low in contrast, and you want Deckard’s pages plain. Fonts still come from your settings, and a high contrast theme keeps its own colors, as it does in every Deckard theme.
• Replicant, Oblivion, LCARS, Tomcat, Fellowship, Synthwave, Cooper, and Razorback are Deckard’s film-inspired styles. Razorback, after the nav displays in The Expanse, draws thin blue rules on blue-black and keeps gold for what is chosen or under the pointer.

In every theme, red means overdue or high priority, and nothing else.

Esper Themes brings these looks to the whole editor, as VS Code color themes, from the same makers. Search for it in the Extensions view, or find it on the Marketplace.

Mimic, in Solarized Dark	Mimic, in Solarized Light
Corpo, with a dark VS Code theme	Corpo, with a light VS Code theme
Replicant	Oblivion	LCARS
Tomcat	Fellowship	Synthwave
Cooper	Razorback

Display

How much a page draws is one switch, Zen, the same on every page; see Zen for where to turn it on. With Zen on:

• Plain styling: thin frames, without each theme’s grid, corners, glow, codes, or display headings, and no capitals or letter-spacing on headings, buttons, or tabs, two heading sizes kept. DECKARD ▾ stays. Text from your notes is never set in capitals or letter-spaced, in any theme, with Zen on or off: a note’s title and headings, its tables, query results and embeds, Linked from, and the tag a search page is about.
• No help text: the lines that teach are hidden, such as the search box’s line of syntax, the builder’s paragraph, Refine’s line on Alt- and Shift-click, the Graph’s Open a note to draw the graph around it., why Context lists a result, and an empty board column’s line on dragging. What a line says is there stays: an empty place keeps its state, such as No tasks. or No tags indexed yet., and loses only how to fill it; where Task Statuses saves, and a search that fails to parse, stay too.
• Compact spacing, and flat cards: rows parted by a divider, which lift onto the card surface under the pointer or keyboard focus.
• Tags as text: where tags are listed on their own, such as a note card’s tags and Refine, each is plain text in the theme’s tag color, its # or @ kept, rather than a framed chip. A tag inside a task’s title is always text.

Zen never hides data. Every count beside a name, such as a widget’s total, a group’s count, a board column’s tasks, or a tab’s results, shows with Zen on or off, and a due date is written in full, “Overdue 2 days · 2026-10-02”. Zen changes no color, and removes no button or filter; a tool it quiets stays where it was (see Zen). In every theme the flat cards’ divider reaches 3:1 against the page and the tag color 4.5:1, which a test checks on each change.

Page width, under Appearance in ⋯ on Home, a search page, and the note page, keeps pages Limited to a column at most 1000px wide, or makes them Full, the panel’s full width, for a wide monitor. Zen never changes it, and every page keeps the width you chose last. The other pages always use the panel’s full width, or set their own, so their ⋯ has no Page width row.

Card details (deckard.display.cardDetails) says which details an entry shows on the line it keeps for them under its dates, with Zen on or off: where it is written, then its created and updated dates, on one line cut short. The line shows while the pointer is on the entry or it has focus, and always on a touch screen; it keeps its room either way, so nothing moves and nothing is covered. Untick all three for none: no line is kept, and a screen reader still reads where it is written.

Every Display setting is yours alone: it’s the same in every workspace, and a workspace’s settings never change how your pages look.

Dates

Deckard writes every date it shows you in one format, YYYY-MM-DD unless you set another: on pages, in the Tasks view and the editor’s lenses, in Find, the task editor, the date box, completions, and every message that names a day. Deckard: Choose Date Format… shows today in a few formats, such as DD/MM/YYYY, D MMM YYYY, and ddd, MMM D, YYYY, and Custom… says today back in a format as you type it. The format is deckard.display.dateFormat.

A format is written with the tokens Obsidian’s daily notes, Templater, and Periodic Notes use, so one copied from a vault works here unchanged:

The rest of Moment’s tokens work too: Qo, Mo, do, wo, and Wo ordinals, GGGG and gggg week years, DDDD, H, h, k, m, s, A, a, X, x, and l to llll. A date in a note has no time, so a time reads 00:00; only a note’s created and updated dates have one.

Text in [brackets] is written as it is, so [Week] W writes Week 40; any other character is written as it is too. Names are English, as the rest of Deckard is, and L and LL follow VS Code’s display language. A format that is empty, or writes no part of a date, reads as YYYY-MM-DD.

Where a day has little room, as the Tasks view’s day headings, Today’s note in Context and Go to…, the calendar’s day title, search completions, and Linked from, it’s written in deckard.display.shortDateFormat, ddd, MMM D unless you set another, such as ddd D MMM. A day in another year is written in the full format, so a short format needs no year. Where Deckard names the weekday beside a date, as the task editor’s Friday 2026-09-25, it leaves the weekday out when your format writes one.

What Deckard writes into your notes stays YYYY-MM-DD: task dates such as 📅 2026-10-02, daily note names, reviews, inserted links, searches such as due = 2026-10-02, exports, and what the AI assistant’s tools give and take. A numeric date typed into a date box is read day first when your format writes the day first, as DD/MM/YYYY does.

Zen

Zen is one checkbox, Zen under Appearance in any page’s ⋯, and one command, Deckard: Toggle Zen; the Zen button in a page’s title bar turns it on or off too. The setting is deckard.display.zen.

• Hidden: decorative labels, the grid backdrop, the eyebrow’s trail, and every line that teaches, such as the search box’s line of syntax; cards are flat and tags are text.
• Drawn: the page’s bar, the search field and anything that is filtering the page, with every count and date. Point at or tab into an area to see the rest.

• Shown where it stands: the rest of a page’s tools are drawn when you point at or tab into their area, such as the Task board’s **Board

  Table, **Group, Sort and Can start now from its search box, a column’s + from its column, a search page’s Sort and Bulk edit from the results heading, Home’s Customize from its tabs, Context’s gears and Sort from their headings, a calendar’s week marks from their week, each row’s ⋯ and Create hub note on a type’s rows from their row, and a typed row’s Edit fields… from its fields on the Note page, or from its hub card’s header on a tag’s page, and Add fields… from a tag’s Fields card, and a tag’s page’s Mark seen and a person’s Copy as agenda from their band and card. A field’s name stays drawn and opens the form from the keyboard. Typing a search doesn’t show them. A Sort that isn’t at its default, a type’s Sorted by lead with its Sort A-Z, Can start now while it is pressed, and a week mark whose week has a note stay drawn. On a touch screen everything is drawn.

• Folded: Refine’s values, under Refine, and the Notes Graph’s Focus and Filters, as Display already is; each heading says what it is doing, such as Refine · 2 set. Select a heading to unfold it.

Zen never removes a control or moves one into ⋯: every button, filter, checkbox, and tag stays in its place, in the Tab order, and in what a screen reader reads.

In the editor, Zen hides the dotted line under a defined term; hovering the term still says what it means.

Deckard’s Zen quiets Deckard’s pages; VS Code’s Zen Mode (⌘K Z, or Ctrl+K Z) hides the workbench around them, and the two combine.

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