Colors, icons & weekends¶
How bars look, and how the timeline itself is drawn. Most of these work in both modes; status/priority coloring needs TaskNotes. To read the chart's cues from inside the chart, open the legend.
Bar colors¶
Bars can be colored in a few ways, set per view under Settings → Appearance:
- Bar fill — what colors the bar's body: the default hierarchy palette (green parents / blue children), By status, By priority, By calendar, Obsidian theme, or None. By status and By priority need the TaskNotes companion palette; standalone they fall back to Default.
- Bar strip — the same choice again for a left-edge strip, set independently of the fill. Ships as None.
The same kitchen-remodel tasks under different fill × strip combinations (click any image to zoom):
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A left-edge strip coloured by status (green done, blue in-progress, grey open), with priority icons on each bar.
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The same strip, now coloured by priority, with status icons — swap which attribute the strip and the icon each show.
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Setting Bar fill to By status floods the whole bar with the status colour instead of leaving it to a thin strip — bolder, when colour is the main signal you want.
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Obsidian theme colours by your accent colour — children the raw accent, parents a higher-contrast tone. Change your accent and the bars re-tint live.
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The Default palette ignores your theme: green parents, blue children. It looks the same in every vault.
Default vs Obsidian theme¶
Both color bars by hierarchy — parents one tone, children another — but they source that color differently:
- Default uses a fixed palette that ignores your theme: green parents, blue children. It looks the same in every vault.
- Obsidian theme follows your accent color (Settings → Appearance → Accent color, or whatever your theme sets). Children take the raw accent; parents a higher-contrast tone of the same hue — so a yellow accent gives yellow bars, and changing your accent or theme re-tints them live.
Under By status and By priority, a bar is colored by its own value — parents and children alike, with no hierarchy coloring. Only values the TaskNotes palette defines get a colour; a task whose status or priority is blank or unrecognised takes none from that channel.
By calendar is the mixed case. A task whose calendar sets a colour takes that colour. A task with no calendar, or one whose calendar note defines no colour, keeps the hierarchy treatment instead — green parents, blue children — so both appear side by side in one chart.
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Task icons¶
A small Task icon can sit on each bar, showing its Status or Priority (companion only), or None.
Date-status indicators¶
Show date-status indicators on bars signals any bar with an incomplete or reversed date range, and the signal names which problem it found. A task with one date missing (the other inferred) or with no dates (placed at today as a placeholder) is cut with a torn, zigzag edge on the side that was never authored, so the bar reads as unreliable exactly where its date is. A task with start and end swapped takes a distinct orange treatment instead. A task carrying both dates in chronological order is never flagged; there is no "overdue" marker. On by default.
The teeth are capped by the bar's own width, so a short task at a coarse zoom — a one-day placeholder on a month scale, say — can be too narrow to show them. Zoom in when you need to be sure whether a bar's dates were authored.
Reading bar decorations¶
Four visual cues can appear on a bar. The two date cues are alternatives — a bar is torn or orange, never both — while the hatch and the fade say nothing about dates and can stack on top of either (see also the legend):
| Cue | What it means |
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| Torn (zigzag) edge | That side's date was never authored — inferred from the other date, or placed at today because the task has no dates. The tear sits on the side the missing date belongs to, so a bar can be torn on one edge or both. Toggled by Show date-status indicators on bars. |
| Orange bar | The task's start falls after its due date. A fully-dated task in the right order is never orange. Toggled by Show date-status indicators on bars. |
| Diagonal hatch | The same task appears in more than one place — e.g. a note shown under several parents. Every copy is hatched equally; none is the "real" one. This is about duplication, not dates. |
| Faded / muted bar | A context row pulled in by Show all expansion that doesn't itself match the Base's filter — shown only for structure. Its faintness is the Expanded items opacity (55% by default). |
Weekend shading¶
The timeline shades weekend day-columns so a multi-day bar doesn't read as if the whole span were working time. Weekend days follow your locale.
Weekends are the built-in default. To shade your own days off, such as holidays, a four-day week or a Sunday-to-Thursday week, give your tasks a calendar. See Calendars and working time. A calendar adds shading on top of the weekend and never removes it.
Controlled by Highlight weekends (on by default).
Shading only shows at day/hour scales
Weekend columns are only meaningful when individual days are visible, so shading renders at the hour and day scales, not at week or month.
Maximize within Obsidian¶
The ⤢ button in the top-right corner of the chart expands it to fill the Obsidian window — without pushing Obsidian's own modals, menus, command palette, or hover previews behind it. Full walkthrough (and how to exit) in Chart controls → Full screen.
Layout¶
The grid/timeline split is resizable and remembers its width, and you can set a min/max height and toggle a toolbar. All of these live in Settings → Appearance.