openidea/docs/themes.md

Built-in theme sources

OpenIDEA includes Islands Light, Islands Dark, High Contrast, Solarized Light, Solarized Dark, One Light and One Dark. Select them in Settings › Appearance, Welcome › Customize or the existing quick theme menu. The same themes are available as explicit editor schemes; “Theme default” follows the UI theme. “Sync with OS” uses the existing preferred light/dark theme settings. Existing ids (light, dark, dark-hc, system) and attribute overrides remain valid.

Upstream palettes and licenses

All sources below are the original authors’ repositories, pinned for reproducibility. Full MIT notices are preserved in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md.

Theme	Original source revision	Palette / mapping source
Solarized Light / Dark	Ethan Schoonover, 62f656a	README’s sixteen exact sRGB hex colours; vim-colors-solarized/colors/solarized.vim semantic roles; iTerm2 ANSI slots
One Light syntax	GitHub / Atom, d845790	styles/colors.less, styles/syntax-variables.less
One Dark syntax	GitHub / Atom, 9c96f44	styles/colors.less, styles/syntax-variables.less
One Light UI	GitHub / Atom, a27bce3	styles/ui-variables.less, styles/ui-variables-custom.less
One Dark UI	GitHub / Atom, 18c2143	styles/ui-variables.less, styles/ui-variables-custom.less

Mapping into OpenIDEA

src/platform/themes.ts registers the stable ids. data-theme retains the light/dark kind for icons, native controls and existing selectors; data-color-theme selects the additional palette. High Contrast continues to use data-contrast="high". Plugin themes clear the built-in palette attribute and retain their existing light/dark fallback; removing a plugin restores the chosen built-in palette.

src/styles/tokens.css contains the shared mapping for all colour tokens and four palette blocks. No new dependency is required. Solarized uses base3/base2 for light backgrounds and base03/base02 for dark backgrounds, base00/base0 for text, and the original eight accents. Vim’s statements are green, constants and strings cyan, identifiers blue, types yellow, and comments the original subdued base1/base01. Solarized’s original ANSI slot order is preserved (the bright slots intentionally include orange, violet and neutrals).

One retains the exact HSL definitions from Atom, avoiding rounded palette approximations: 230° / 1% / 98% light and 220° / 13% / 18% dark editor backgrounds; purple keywords, green strings, blue functions, red variables/tags, orange numbers and attributes, yellow classes, and the original mono-3 comments. UI frame/popup levels use Atom’s relative background lightness formulas with the matching syntax theme. OpenIDEA’s shared UI text uses the syntax foreground and mono-2 for readable secondary labels. Selection and cursor-line values follow Atom’s syntax variables. Atom does not define a terminal ANSI palette: One’s ANSI slots reuse its exact semantic syntax hues, repeating them for bright colours rather than inventing a different palette. One Light maps ANSI white and bright white to its mono-2 and mono-1 text colours so they remain visible on the light terminal background.

Components without an upstream equivalent (feedback banners, tool window states, search fills and focus decoration) use the original semantic hues, neutrals, or explicit color-mix() tints. This adapts colours to the existing layout; it does not recreate Atom’s or Vim’s UI. Platform traffic-light colours stay platform colours. Original subdued comments and some syntax accents have lower contrast than a high-contrast accessibility theme; High Contrast remains available.

Native windows open in the theme's frame colour before their page loads: src-tauri/src/theme_frame.rs reads --bg-frame of each built-in theme from tokens.css itself (resolving var() and hsl()), so there is no second colour table to keep in sync. Elsewhere the frontend resolves HSL and color-mix() tokens to RGB (src/platform/cssColor.ts) for Tauri's window API, the native Settings window, Mermaid and the terminal.

public/boot.js restores the palette (data-color-theme) and the splash's resolved frame, text and accent colours before the application stylesheet loads, so a restart in One Dark or Solarized shows no flash of another theme. The backend's settings persistence remains authoritative. Terminal, Mermaid and editor-scheme observers also watch palette changes within the same light/dark kind. Custom accents, explicit editor schemes, per-scheme attribute overrides, compact mode and accessibility options retain their precedence.

src/features/settings/__tests__/contrast.test.ts requires every palette theme to define every colour token of the base themes (in the shared mapping or its own block), so a token added to tokens.css later can't silently fall back to an Islands colour.

Browser evidence

These approved screenshots are reused from the original theme implementation on 0.1.15; regression checks are rerun against the upstream contribution base. Captured at 1400 × 900 in Linux Chromium 154 using OpenIDEA's public in-memory acme-api project / Kotlin fixture and synthetic ANSI terminal output. The terminal is a real xterm renderer, without a native PTY or shell. These images cover the shell, sidebar, editor, gutter, find matches, terminal, Settings, focused controls, disabled settings and the selected theme popup.

Theme	Workbench, editor and terminal	Settings and theme popup
Solarized Light	Screenshot	Screenshot
Solarized Dark	Screenshot	Screenshot
One Light	Screenshot	Screenshot
One Dark	Screenshot	Screenshot

The browser regression also checks refresh / startup cache restoration, selection visibility, same-kind switches, the quick menu, existing themes, explicit editor schemes and preferred OS themes. Native startup colours are covered by Rust unit tests.