The Settings Tab

The Celestial Vault has its own dedicated settings tab alongside Obsidian's standard settings. This is your single panel for everything Celestial-specific — identity, widget, atmosphere, shortcuts, sharing.

How To Open It

1. Click the gear icon in the bottom-left of Obsidian (or Cmd/Ctrl + ,)
2. In the left sidebar of Settings, find "Celestial Vault"
3. Click it

You're in.

What You'll See — Top To Bottom

1. Three Tutorial Cards (top)

The top of the settings panel shows three quick-link cards:

• 🎬 Celestial walkthrough — YouTube tour of the flagship-specific features
• 🎬 Kepano-style notes — deep dive on the categorical philosophy
• 🎬 Time Garden — tour of the temporal journaling system

Plus a link to these docs.

These are the same cards shown at the end of The Welcome Experience. Settings keeps them around in case you want to revisit later.

2. Identity

Two fields:

• Nickname — the name shown in the empty-tab greeting
• Greeting prefix — how the greeting opens (Hello, Hi, Heya, etc.)

Together these produce *<Greeting>. <Name>.* on the empty tab.

(More: Identity & Greeting.)

3. Journal Widget

Five controls for the journal widget in your sidebar:

• Vault mode image — the background image when no streak is active
• Streak background overlay — the image that swaps in during an active streak
• Counter mode — toggle between "Streak" (consecutive days) and "Total" (lifetime days)
• Counter icon — any Lucide icon name (default: star)
• Open Journal Widget button — manually open the widget (in case it's hidden)
• Reset onboarding — replays the welcome flow + first-launch shimmer

4. Migration

A single button:

• Import an existing vault — opens an OS folder picker, then recursively copies your old vault's .md files, images, and templates into /old vault/<name>/

(Full guide: Importing Your Old Vault.)

5. Sharing & Feedback

A single toggle:

• Sharing prompt enabled — turns on/off the periodic sharing popup that asks you to share the vault on Reddit or leave a Senja review

6. Polish & Atmosphere

Four toggles for the visual / experiential layer:

• Empty-state atmosphere — the stars + greeting on empty tabs
• Animations (master switch) — gates all four veil animations + the widget burst
• Dynamic shortcut status bar — shows the context-aware shortcut bar at the bottom
• Note Lock — enables the password gate on *Locked* notes

(More: Atmosphere & Polish Toggles.)

7. Shortcut Bindings

A list of 12 capturable rows — one per rebindable action.

Each row shows:

• The action's name (e.g., "Open daily note")
• The current key combo (e.g., ⌥⇧D)
• A small revert icon

Click the binding to capture a new key. Click revert to restore that one row's default. Below the list:

• Reset all — restores every default

(Full guide: Customizing Shortcuts.)

How Changes Take Effect

What's Not In This Tab

A few related settings live in other tabs of Obsidian Settings:

• AI models, AI prompts, chunking → in the Time Garden Plugin tab (because they're TG-side, not Celestial-side)
• CSS snippets, themes → in the Appearance tab
• Plugin enable/disable → in the Community Plugins tab
• Hotkeys for non-shortcut-bar commands → in the Hotkeys tab

Where it makes sense, Celestial's settings tab links out to those other tabs.

Backing Up Your Settings

If you want to save your specific settings configuration (e.g., before updating) — you can copy the file:

.obsidian/plugins/celestial-plugin/data.json

This contains every setting in the Celestial tab, plus your streak history. Save it somewhere safe. To restore: paste it back, reload Obsidian.

Up Next

• Identity & Greeting — the nickname and greeting in detail
• Customizing Shortcuts — the 12-row shortcut binder
• Atmosphere & Polish Toggles — fine-tuning the visual layer