Colorschemes for the Discerning Developer

That colorscheme in your editor…

…how long have you been looking at it? When did you change it last?

Years? Yeah, me too. 😅

I recently took a spin to see what was new out there, and boy, are there some cool colorschemes!

I eventually settled on a lovely theme called Catppuccin (specifically the Mocha variant, the darkest one). But here are some of the others I came across. Maybe there’s something here to give your editor a nice new coat of paint as well!

Multi-Editor Colorschemes

These colorschemes have multiple ports, making them a nice way to extend it across all your tooling.

• Catppuccin
  • Beautifully balanced pastels pop off a dark blue background. It also has one of the nicest light variants I’ve seen.
• Rosé Pine
  • Another balanced theme with multiple variations… This palette trends towards warmer natural colors.
• Tokyo Night
  • This was my pick before Catppuccin. I liked it so much that I used some of the colors here on my site! It celebrates the neon of Tokyo nights.
• Dracula
  • A nice dark scheme with an amazing amount of ports and implementations. Slightly darker than Catppuccin and Rosé Pine. The purple and orange feel especially thematic.
• Nord
  • The power of BLUE! It’s bold and STRONG.
• Solarized
  • This was the OG theme that felt like real consideration had been put into the colors. I consider this the predecessor of most of these themes and it’s STILL a pretty solid choice.
• Oceanic Next
  • A slightly desaturated palette, this sits somewhere in between Solarized and Tomorrow Night.
• Tomorrow Night
  • Bold color choices, and nice if you don’t want a blue background.
• Iceberg
  • High contrast, bluish theme. Feels like if you turned down the lights on Nord a bit.
• One Half
  • Based on Atom’s ‘One’ colorscheme, a practical mix of colors on a gray (or light gray!) background.

NeoVim Only

These colorschemes are mostly for Vim/NeoVim, but many have other ports.

• Kanagawa
  • Based on the Katsushika Hokusai painting of the same name, this theme has some unique colors giving it a different feel.
• OneDark
  • Another Atom One Dark successor, with TreeSitter support.
• Gruvbox
  • One of the few themes that feels like distinctly its own thing. It has retro vibes that make me nostalgic for the green and amber-colored displays of the past.

Decorating your ‘Personalized Development Environment’

I have always liked TJ DeVrie’s concept of the PDE, of creating an ENVIRONMENT that’s JUST YOURS and a joy to use. One of the best ways I know of to personalize a space is with color. So what does YOUR colorscheme say about you? If it’s not speaking to YOU, maybe it’s time to change it up!