Formatting and colours

Select some text and a toolbar appears above it:

Turn into shows the block's type and changes it.
Link adds a web link: paste the address and press Enter. Leave it empty to remove a link. Web addresses you type or paste become links automatically.
Bold (⌘B), italic (⌘I), ~~strikethrough~~ (⌘⇧S) and inline code (⌘E).
A sets the text colour and the highlighter sets the background colour.

You can also type the Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, ~~strike~~ and backticks for code.

Colours

There are nine colours, for text or background:

Gray · Brown · Orange · Yellow · Green · Blue · Purple · Pink · Red

There are a few ways to add colour:

Select text, then use A or the highlighter in the selection menu. Pick Default to remove a colour.
Press ⌘⇧H to highlight the selection in yellow.
Click a block's ⋮⋮ handle and choose Color to colour the whole block.
Type / and a colour, such as /red or /blue background, to colour the current block. On an empty line, the colour applies to what you type next.

Pressing Enter at the end of a coloured line starts the next line without the colour.

A callout's colour is its background. Choose Color in its block menu to change it, and click its icon to pick a new one.

🧭

A blue callout.

✅

A green callout.

⚠️

A red callout.

Colours are saved as small HTML tags, so other Markdown tools still show the text:

<span data-color="red" data-bg="yellow">Red text on yellow</span>

Callouts use Obsidian's callout syntax. The word in brackets is the colour, and the emoji after it is the icon:

> [!green] ✅
> A green callout.

See Writing and blocks for every block's Markdown, and Keyboard shortcuts for all the shortcuts.