Not another color swap — a unified aesthetic engine for every JetBrains IDE.

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Ayu Islands synchronizes palette, font, glow, and accent color into a cohesive look — one click, entire mood shift. Built on ayu-colors (MIT) and endorsed by Ike Ku, the original Ayu author, who called the project "brilliant" and invited it to ayutheme.com.

30-day premium trial included. All premium features unlocked on install, no credit card. The free tier is a complete theme — not a teaser.

What sets it apart

• Aesthetic engine, not a skin — 500+ hand-tuned UI properties, expanded semantic highlighting, and dedicated settings panels to shape how the IDE looks and feels
• 4 curated presets — Whisper, Ambient, Neon, Cyberpunk — each synchronizes font, glow intensity, and indent colors into one cohesive mood
• Syntax control surface — language-aware syntax presets for everyone, plus Pro-level Custom tuning and readability controls when you want comments, docs, and operators to recede
• Plugin ecosystem — accent color propagates into CodeGlance Pro and Indent Rainbow. As far as I know, no other JetBrains theme does this
• Creator-endorsed — the original Ayu author endorsed this project and invited it to the official Ayu site

Premium — make the IDE feel yours

	Accent control — decide exactly where your accent color appears: scrollbars, links, caret line, search highlights, progress bars, bracket matches, inlay hints, tag matches. Eight independent switches. Accent rotation — automatic preset cycling or contrast-aware random. Per-project and per-language accent pins — bind a color to a specific project or language (Kotlin → cyan, Python → gold); the focus-swap kicks in instantly. Settings shows a live language-proportions breakdown of the current project so you know which pin will take effect, with a Rescan Project Language action to refresh on demand. Language override diagnostics explain detected, polyglot, forced-language, and project-fallback decisions without changing the default dominance logic. Peacock-parity chrome tinting — when a pin fires, every chrome surface (status bar, nav bar, tool stripes, panel borders) tints automatically with that accent; WCAG-aware foreground keeps text readable at any saturation. Accent from project icon — when enabled, projects without a pin automatically take their accent from the project icon (.idea/icon.png) on open.
	Glow — a soft light beneath tabs and panels: Soft, Sharp Neon, or Gradient. Add Pulse, Breathe, or Reactive animation. Control intensity, width, and which of the 7 panels glow.
	Font presets — 4 curated Nerd Fonts (Whisper, Ambient, Neon, Cyberpunk) with one-click apply, live preview, and per-preset fine-tuning. Install, delete, or reinstall fonts directly from Settings with a consent dialog before any filesystem change.
	Workspace — auto-fit or fixed width for Project View, Commit, and Git panels with min/max bounds. Git panel splitter auto-resizes the branches and file-changes trees. Hide the filesystem path and scrollbar from Project View. Commit Panel path display can move full paths to tooltips or shorten leading directories inline.
	Plugin sync — accent into CodeGlance Pro minimap and Indent Rainbow guides. More integrations in development. Bracket scope — a colored gutter stripe showing the full scope on bracket hover.

Quick-Switcher Widget — a chip in the main toolbar reflects your current accent. Left-click opens a popup with variant + Islands UI toggle, the accent grid, related toggles (Chrome tinting, Glow, Accent rotation, Follow system), and quick actions (Pin, Random, Lighter, Darker, Copy Hex). Right-click opens the same quick actions in a keyboard-friendly context menu. Hide the widget from Settings → Ayu Islands → General if you prefer a cleaner toolbar.

Tab styling — Islands UI offers underline, full accent bar, or none; Classic UI has underline thickness from hairline to bold.

VCS color customization — Settings → Ayu Islands → VCS tunes intensity across five surfaces (diff viewer, Project View file status, editor gutter, conflict markers, Git blame annotations). Each section carries its own profile — Whisper, Ambient, Neon, Cyberpunk, or Custom with per-surface sliders. Master toggle off by default; 2.6.2 colors stay byte-identical until you opt in.

Syntax tuning — Settings → Ayu Islands → Syntax gives Pro users per-language sliders for declarations, identifiers, keywords/docs, literals, and operators. Each confirmed primitive also has a compact Bold / Italic control: emphasis layers on top of its inherited Color Scheme style by default, while Replace inherited style applies an exact font style when explicitly selected. Add global readability controls — Dim comments, Soften documentation, Quiet operators, Emphasize declarations — when you want dense code to breathe without editing individual Color Scheme keys.

Font preset recovery — turning presets off restores your earlier font settings only when they still belong to the same color scheme and match what Ayu Islands applied. Manual changes and console inheritance are preserved. If recovery cannot be matched safely, your current fonts and a recovery backup are kept, with a warning. Applying a new preset after disabling starts from your current settings.

New or renamed schemes — choose a font preset and Apply in Settings to manage fonts for a newly selected, renamed, or copied color scheme. To keep the same preset and options, open Customize, select Reapply preset, then click Apply. Earlier settings from before an IDE scheme rename are kept as a backup and are not restored automatically.

Onboarding wizard — a full-tab welcome opens on first install with preset cards, theme variant picker, and accent swatches. After upgrades, a release showcase tab opens automatically with captioned screenshots of the marquee features; reopen anytime via Tools → Ayu Islands → Show What's New.

Free — a complete theme, not a teaser

6 theme variants (Mirage, Dark, Light — Classic & Islands UI). 40+ individually crafted language syntaxes, expanded semantic highlighting, and four one-click syntax presets. 12 accent presets + custom picker + macOS system sync. 4 font presets with one-click apply and live preview. Full VCS/diff colors and a 16-color terminal scheme. All free. No time limit. No feature degradation.

Theme variants

Mirage — warm blue-gray

Dark — deep midnight

Light — warm daylight

Installation

From JetBrains Marketplace

Settings → Plugins → Marketplace → search "Ayu Islands" → Install

Then activate: Settings → Appearance & Behavior → Appearance → Theme → pick your variant.

Manual

1. Download the .zip from Releases
2. Settings → Plugins → ⚙ → Install Plugin from Disk...
3. Select the downloaded .zip and restart the IDE

Supported languages

Ayu Islands provides hand-tuned syntax highlighting for 40+ languages and formats:

Java, Kotlin, Scala, C# / .NET (Rider / ReSharper), Swift, Rust, Go, Erlang, Lua, Python, Ruby, PHP, Dart, JavaScript / TypeScript, CoffeeScript, HTML, CSS, HAML, SLIM, JSP, Qute, Django Templates, GraphQL, JSON, XML, YAML, Properties, Puppet, Bash / Shell, Markdown, Regular Expressions, and more.

Languages without explicit overrides inherit from themed DEFAULT_* attributes — so every language benefits from the Ayu palette.

Building from source

./gradlew buildPlugin        # Build the distribution ZIP
./gradlew runIde             # Launch a sandboxed IDE with the plugin
./gradlew verifyPlugin       # Verify against 12 IDE targets

Output: build/distributions/ayu-jetbrains-<version>.zip

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines and CHANGELOG.md for the release history.

Community

Got ideas, questions, or a setup you're proud of?

• Feature Requests — suggest and vote on what's next
• Show Your Setup — share your config and screenshots
• Q&A — ask anything about Ayu Islands

Found a bug? Open an issue with our bug report template.

Credits

• Built on Ayu by Ike Ku (@dempfi) — color palettes from ayu-theme/ayu-colors (MIT)
• IntelliJ Platform SDK by JetBrains

License

BSL-1.1 — source-available, converts to Apache 2.0 on 2030-02-24.