Let's kick off the new year with a fresh new green theme designed to please your eyes and lift your spirit! Mint Green Light Theme for IDEA is still beta (but better than never released). See known issues below.
Euphoric Eucalyptus, Transformative Teal, Mint Green Light Theme for IDEAs
When I heard that the color of the year 2026 might be in the greenish spectrum, I thought that's a good occasion to revive, finalize, and release my theme, which had been lurking on GitHub as an unfinished working draft by the name of intellij-mint-green-light-theme for about two years.
Reviewing my notes, pictures, and screenshot collages, I found other sources of inspiration like notebooks, Google's mint green Pixel phone, Linux Mint desktop themes, and, of course, the few existing green themes for my IDE.
Misleading Moodboard Color Contrast
Names and moodboard collages might be misleading for several reasons. Naming is creative and context-specific. Trend colors for fashion, interior design and glossy print magazines often don't like they're supposed to feel when reused with their official hex color codes in a web app or a website.
That's also due to color contrast and preview size. Like those small swatch albums of thumbnail color samples that are hard to distinguish in miniature but make a great difference when painted on a wall or used as a full-screen background color.
Implementing the Feeling
That's why I said good bye to trend color codes while still being inspired by the feeling invoked by thoses beautiful names. Transformative teal and warm eucalyptus sound so much more positive and inspiring than Pantone's off-white official color of the year 2026. I made up more color names for a working draft CSS preview, like pistachio yellowish green, neon grass, faded footer, and light console.
I hope that my theme will reflect my moodboard's spirit at least a little and that it can become another one of my current favorite editor themes, specifically:
- Cute Pink Light Theme (inspired by the VSCode theme)
- Orange Rain Light Theme (my own creation)
- Dark Purple (by JetBrains)
I often switched between Dark Purple at night or on winter evenings and Cute Pink Light in the sun at high noon, while Orange Rain Light is a comforting allrounder and it has replaced Sepia themes from my previous favourites.
I also admire and aspire the serene flow of existing greenish and yellowish themes that I compared in a previous post.
The greenish Light Green and Love Your Eyes theme felt a little too cold, while the yellowish Espresso and Sepia themes were not green enough. Also I don't like editor fonts with ligatures that display character sequences like !== as single characters. While that might be correct in a traditional academic sense of typography and computing science, it still jars me when I'm coding.
Don't get me wrong, I think that every working theme deserves its place in a theme selection, the more diversity, the better. But I also produced some themes that I wouldn't use for every day work, including Mocha Mouse, my mock contribution to last year's alleged trend color of the year according to the Pantone company.
Although my Mocca Mouse got downloaded more than 1000 times, I don't consider it something serious to showcase.
For comparison: my Orange Rain Light theme has been downloaded (only) 2600 times, while my Cute Pink Light Theme, my earliest public release, adapting an existing VSCode theme, has 87,296 total downloads by now.
Care for Subtle Details
My green light theme has kind of a dark pre-release history, as it used to break the IDE and I had no idea why, and I wasn't really happy with the first color palette. I took a closer look at my Orange Rain Light theme, as a stable working code to build upon, with a gentle color palette. I noticed its subtle details again, that connect the unequal blue and orange "rain" themes: thin hair lines (thanks to JetBrains' UI layout) colored in vivid, contrasting blue tones.
Rebuilding Green based on Orange
With the colour palettes side by side, I tried to apply the orange rain theme's visual rhythm to my newly designed green theme.
^ Work in progress screenshot: editing the green theme inspired by the orange one.
Mint Green Light Theme Release Candidate
This is what it looks like when released as version 1.1.1 in January 2026:
Known Issues
This theme has issues!
This theme occasionally breaks the UI, making the main menu inaccessible in PhpStorm 2024.2.5 on Linux Mint. Workaround: if this happens, you can still use the context menu and open the settings with the top right gear icon button (see screenshot) and disable the theme. Solution: ???
Apart from technical issues, some areas lack contrast and I'm still not 100% happy with the overall look and feel.
Honestly, I'm quite disappointed that the current 1.1.1 version seems so unlike the stable orange theme that it was supposed to follow.
Work in Progress
As my Mint Green Light Theme is still a fresh release, feel free to comment and open GitHub issues if you find bugs or you'd rather see a slightly different shade of green on a certain part of your screen. Also, feel free to fork my code or adapt the theme to other editors like VSCode, Emacs, or whatever you use, or colorize other themeable software like Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird accordingly.
You can try out the latest theme version here:
https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/29656-mint-green-light-theme/
Top comments (5)
Looks awesome, great work on this!
Thanks! 🙏
Thanks for sharing this. Well a big question is why a web developer would use Intellij 😉
Haha, that's a naming problem, like why would web developers use Visual Studio (Code), but admitting that I use PhpStorm doesn't sound much better I guess. Maybe I should have said PyStorm.
Not much is more fun than arguing about IDEs :) Maybe arguing about colors. Anyway - have a successful day!