IntelliJ Platform Plugin SDK
 
IntelliJ Platform Explorer

Color Scheme Management

Edit pageLast modified: 12 July 2023

Color scheme management in IntelliJ IDEA 12.1 was changed to ease scheme designers' work and make schemes look equally well for different programming languages even if not designed specifically for these languages. Previously, language plugins were using fixed default colors incompatible, for example, with dark schemes.

The new implementation allows specifying a dependency on a set of standard text attributes linked to a scheme but not to any specific language. Language-specific attributes still can be set by a scheme designer if needed, but it's optional. New color schemes have got a new .icls (Idea CoLor Scheme) extension to avoid confusion about compatibility problems with older platform versions: if only standard attributes are set, they will not be used by the version before 12.1, resulting in different highlighting colors.