blackbird-jetbrains

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Discontinued — browse other JetBrains themes.

The Blackbird theme for JetBrains IDEs.

The high-contrast dark theme for spellcasters

Why try Blackbird?

• High readability with a contrast ratio of 7:1 or better for editor text (WCAG Level AAA).
• A simple palette to reduce visual overload in the editor.
• Good default font settings with JetBrains Mono at size 15 and 1.1 line spacing. No italics. Ligatures in the editor but not in the terminal.
• Reduced distractions with stripe marks for errors only, instead of for errors, warnings, weak warnings, and others.
• Text editor looks with a unified background color and minimal borders.
• Lightweight implementation as a pure theme with no plugin requirements.

Advice for Mac users

To make the Mac title bar match the color of the theme:

1. Help → Edit Custom Properties…
2. Create the idea.properties file if prompted.
3. Add this line to the file, save, and restart: ide.mac.transparentTitleBarAppearance=true

Advice for minimalists

• Turn off the toolbar, navigation bar, and tool window bars (View → Appearance).
• Try turning off tabs (Editor → General → Tabs → Tab Placement → none). Then navigate with Search Everywhere (Shift Shift), Open Files (Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + O), (Recent Files (Ctrl/Cmd + E), or set up IdeaVim bindings to cycle through tabs/buffers.
• Keep the Project tool window closed unless you need a tree view.

Change the default font

1. Uncheck “Use color scheme font…” at Editor → Color Scheme → Color Scheme Font.
2. Set your font at Editor → Font.

AceJump colors

If you use AceJump, set colors manually at Preferences → Tools → AceJump:

• Jump mode color: ff7883
• Tag background color: 97ecc7
• Tag foreground color: 011529
• Target mode color: ff7883
• Text highlight color: 1d5278

Credits

• Blackbird name and color scheme inspired by the Blackbird comic artwork by Jen Bartel.
• Background color and aesthetic inspired by the Night Owl theme by Sarah Drasner.
• “Blackbird“ (Raven) icon by Imogen Oh, licensed via Iconfinder.
• The Blackbird header in this readme is set in Flood Std Regular by Joachim Müller-Lancé.

Color palette

Color	Native (JetBrains)	sRGB (Electron/VS Code/iTerm)
midnight	#051527	#011528
portal	#97ecc7	#79efc4
nevermore	#34b5b3	#00b8b4
potion	#ff709d	#ff639d
obliterate	#fff423	#fff500
spirit	#ffffff	#ffffff
limbo	#8995ac	#8695ae

For tints and other colors see resources/Blackbird.theme.json and resources/Blackbird.xml. Colors in these files use native color space. You will need to convert to sRGB if designing for an application that uses sRGB color space. On Mac, the Digital Color Meter can help to determine the app's color space.