An ode to Flexoki — Alex Priest

There is a small program running on my Mac right now whose entire job is to notice when the sun goes down and restart my file manager.

I built it (well, Claude built it, I asked) because ForkLift can’t switch its own theme when macOS goes dark, and I couldn’t live with my file manager being the one app out of key with everything else on my screen. It’s a real daemon. It launches at login. It watches the system appearance and swaps between two hand-made themes, light and dark.

Both themes are Flexoki.

If you haven’t come across it: Flexoki is a color palette by Steph Ango, the CEO of Obsidian. He calls it “an inky color scheme for prose and code”. Cream paper (), near-black ink (), and eight accent colors tuned in the Oklab color space so they behave like pigment instead of pixels. It descends from Solarized. It’s named after flexography, a printing process, and also after his dog Flexo—who is named after the printing process, and whose name happens to be Bender’s twin from Futurama.¹

Before Obsidian, Ango ran companies that made actual ink: Inkodye, Lumi.² So when he says Flexoki is inspired by analog inks and warm shades of paper, that isn’t a mood board talking. He knows what ink does when you dilute it. The whole palette is a glowing screen lying about being paper, and the lie works. I find these colors calm and pleasant in a way I’ve stopped trying to justify—and somewhere along the way, without quite deciding to, I bent every tool I use toward them.

I mentioned Flexoki once before, when I rebuilt this site. The design system is Flexoki, every color token. But the site is just the part you can see. This week I asked Claude to dig through my machine and inventory everywhere the palette shows up, because I’d lost track.

The results were a little embarrassing?!

ForkLift, plus its babysitting daemon. Raycast, in light and dark, which you can add to your own Raycast in one click. Nova, which I liked enough to publish. CotEditor, which I’d forgotten entirely—the theme file says “author: Alex Priest” and I have no memory of writing it. Vivaldi, a browser I don’t even use anymore: three variants, including a desaturated one that existed only for private windows. A notes app I’ve since deleted. Ghostty ships Flexoki built in, but my config overrides three palette entries anyway, with comments explaining why. Almanac, a little Mac app I’m building, doesn’t have themes. It has one look, and the look is Flexoki. Even the script that sets up a new Mac for me prints its progress in Flexoki colors.

And my keyboard. The backlight on my Keychron breathes a slow orange I asked for, at the time, in exactly these words: “flexoki ish”.

The keyboard is not software.

Two of those apps are gone now, deleted along with their themes. Apps are ephemeral—the man said so himself. The palette just moves into whatever comes next.

Here’s the thing, though: the calm isn’t only in the colors. It’s in the decision being made. My website’s design guide has one rule about color: everything comes from Flexoki, and if you think you need a new color, question whether you need it. One choice, made once, by someone with better taste than me. Editor, terminal, file manager, notes, website, keyboard—the same warm paper, the same eight inks, nothing shouting. Every screen I use all day feels like one place.

And this is an ode to Steph too. What he’s built with Obsidian. File over app, which I’ve reorganized my digital life around. His 40 questions, which I answer every year. The Minimal theme my Obsidian runs (his, naturally, with Flexoki selected inside it). My website is descended from his, down to the “d” you can press to toggle dark mode—stolen outright, with love. I’ve also thrown out about half of his note-taking system as more machinery than I need. The palette stays. The palette goes everywhere.

On the Flexoki page, he writes that the project “has been a battle between my competing desires in science and art”. It’s a battle I never have to fight when I sit down at this machine. He fought it, and shipped the treaty, and every screen I look at is on the same side.

Thanks, Steph. And Flexo.

Not a joke I’m making. His words, on the palette’s page: “I also have a dog named Flexo whose greatness deserved to be immortalized.” The dog has his own page, where the Futurama connection is called “appropriate”. ↩︎
Per his own bio. He co-founded Lumi and Inkodye before Obsidian, and became Obsidian’s CEO in February 2023 after starting out as a community contributor. ↩︎

Footnotes