The Four Veils
Four atmospheric transition animations — Creation, Deletion, Navigation, Graph — that turn note-switching into a small ritual.
When you create a new daily note, navigate between months, delete an old yearly note, or click through the local graph, the Celestial Vault doesn't snap brutally between views. Instead, a brief veil animation plays — a piece of motion design that fills the moment of transition with something beautiful.
There are four of them. Each one fits a different kind of action.
Why Veils Exist
Obsidian's default note transitions are abrupt. You click a link; the new note appears instantly, often with a tiny moment of layout flicker as the new view assembles itself.
Veils replace that flicker with something composed. They give the navigation weight — turning a click into a small ritual, and a vault into something that feels alive.
(Performance is GPU-only — opacity and transform — so even on older machines, veils don't slow you down.)
1. The Creation Veil
Fires when: a temporal note (daily, monthly, Dreamline, yearly) is being created for the first time.
What you see:
- A scattered field of points across the screen
- The points drift toward the center, converging into a glow
- Three additional stars stream in from the bottom-left (synced with the Journal Widget)
- The whole thing is color-themed to the note type — daily uses the day-of-week color, monthly uses the month color, etc.
What this replaces: the ugly "modified externally, merging changes" notice that raw Templater setups sometimes flash during note creation. Celestial's veil hides the entire creation process behind a graceful animation.
2. The Deletion Veil
Fires when: you delete a temporal note.
What you see:
- A cosmic erosion sweep — gold and teal sparks travel from top to bottom across the screen
- 650ms duration, then a fade out
- A neutral palette (no destination color, since the destination is no note)
It's quieter than the creation veil. A goodbye, not a flourish.
3. The Navigation Veil
Fires when: you navigate from one temporal note to another existing temporal note.
What you see:
- The same celestial treatment as creation, but shorter (800ms hold + 300ms exit)
- A destination label — e.g., "Wednesday" if you're navigating to a Wednesday daily, or "March" if you're going to March's monthly note
- Color-themed to the destination
What triggers it:
- Tab header clicks (Obsidian parses the tab title)
- MetaBind nav buttons (the ← Yesterday / Next Month → buttons in the navbar)
- Native Obsidian back/forward buttons (
<>in the view header) - Keyboard shortcuts (
Cmd+Alt+←/→on Mac,Alt+←/→on Windows) - Mouse thumb buttons (back/forward on 5-button mice)
- Calendar plugin clicks (day, month, year, quarter)
- The custom shortcut bar (
⌥⇧← / ⌥⇧→)
Rapid-fire safe.
Click multiple navigation buttons quickly, and each new click cleanly replaces the in-flight veil — no stacking, no broken state. This took serious work to get right, and it's invisible polish: navigation just feels responsive even when you're flying.
4. The Graph Veil
Fires when: you navigate via the local graph view (clicking a node in the graph to jump to its note).
What you see:
- A constellation burst — a different aesthetic from the other three veils
- No destination label (graph navigation isn't tied to a predictable destination type)
- One of 3 alternating asymmetric patterns, picked at random for variety
The graph veil is visually distinct because graph navigation is conceptually distinct — you're following an idea, not a calendar.
The Master Switch
All four veils are gated by a single setting:
Settings → Celestial Vault → Polish & atmosphere → Animations
Toggle it off and every veil — plus the widget burst animation — silently disables. The vault still works exactly the same; it just transitions instantly without animation.
When to turn animations off.
If you're on an older machine, on battery, or sharing your screen and want minimum visual distraction — toggle off. Otherwise, leave them on. They're part of why the vault feels finished.
The Persistent Quickcover
In the background, the celestial-plugin maintains a persistent quickcover — an opaque cover layer that sits in the DOM, invisible by default, ready to mask any active-leaf-change event with zero flash.
This handles the non-veil transitions (you switch from a vault note to another vault note, for example). The cover briefly fades in, the new note assembles behind it, the cover fades out — all in about 100ms. You don't see it; you just notice the absence of flicker.
This is the kind of polish you only consciously notice when it's missing.
When Veils Stop Working
If your veils suddenly aren't playing:
- Check the Animations setting. Might have been toggled off accidentally.
- Reload Obsidian. A clean restart fixes most one-off animation glitches.
- Check for plugin conflicts. A newly-installed plugin that hooks into note transitions can interfere. (See Veils and Animation Issues.)
If they were never working since first install, see Welcome and Onboarding Issues — the celestial-plugin may not be enabled.
Up Next
- Custom Banners — frontmatter-driven banner customization
- Atmosphere & Polish Toggles — the full master-switch settings page
- Veils and Animation Issues — troubleshooting if veils stop firing