dracula-nineties

Dracula-Nineties: JetBrains Rider theme

Four artefacts, one palette, two appearances:

Every hex here is the sRGB rendering of a dracula-nineties.css :root oklch() token: dark from the base palette, light from its prefers-color-scheme: light override. The ANSI slots match themes/ghostty/dracula-nineties one-for-one, so the Rider console and the terminal agree.

IntelliJ Platform themes are one appearance per theme.json, so this ships as two complete themes rather than one theme that follows the system setting: plugin.xml registers both as separate themeProvider entries, and each names its own editorScheme. Pick whichever one you want from Settings → Appearance → Theme; Rider does not switch between them on its own. The light .icls inherits from IntelliJ’s built-in Default scheme (parent_scheme="Default") where the dark one inherits from Darcula, and the light theme.json’s four Checkbox.* icon keys drop the .Dark suffix the dark theme’s copies carry, per JetBrains’ own light/dark icon-key convention. Neither of those two differences has been verified against a running Rider install, only against JetBrains’ theme documentation: say so if either turns out wrong once installed.

These files are generated

scripts/create-themes.nu writes all five (two .icls, two theme.json, one plugin.xml), plus the installable plugin, from the .in template beside each one. Edit the template, never the output.

nu scripts/create-themes.nu           # write the themes, then package the plugin
nu scripts/create-themes.nu --check   # fail if any output drifts from its template
nu scripts/create-themes.nu --no-jar  # themes only

Install

Whole theme, UI plus colour scheme:

nu scripts/create-themes.nu

Settings → Plugins → gear → Install Plugin from Disk… → pick themes/rider/dist/dracula-nineties-rider-<version>.zip → restart. Rider loads a UI theme only from a plugin, which is why there is an artefact to build at all; zip is the whole build.

Why a zip and not a bare jar

The plugin is a zip wrapping a jar:

dracula-nineties-rider-<version>.zip
  Dracula-Nineties/lib/dracula-nineties-rider-<version>.jar

Through v1.18.0 it was a bare jar, and that shape has a trap in it. A bare jar copied by hand into <config>/plugins/ loads perfectly, and Rider 2026.2 reports Loaded custom plugins: … Dracula-Nineties … and the theme appears. But Install Plugin from Disk… refuses it, which is how everyone actually installs. Bare-jar plugins are the legacy form; Name/lib/*.jar is what every other plugin in that directory is, and what every marketplace theme ships.

If you have an old dracula-nineties-rider-*.jar in your plugins directory, delete it before installing the zip. Two copies of the same plugin ID is its own problem.

The plugin is tracked, and nu scripts/maintain.nu release attaches it to the GitHub release for the tag, so it can also be downloaded without cloning. Tracking a zip only works because the build is reproducible: every staged entry is stamped 1980-01-01 twice, since the inner jar is itself created new. -X drops per-machine uid/gid and xattrs, and entries are named in a fixed order instead of swept up by -r. META-INF/MANIFEST.MF deliberately carries no JVM, OS or platform-build stamps for the same reason. Rebuilding unchanged inputs is byte-identical, so a diff means a real change and --check can compare it.

The scheme enters the jar renamed to dracula-nineties.xml. A theme’s editorScheme path is resolved through SchemeManager, which registers only *.xml out of a plugin: bundle it as .icls and Rider shows the UI theme, falls back to Darcula for the editor, and logs refers to unknown color scheme. The file keeps its .icls name on disk because that is what Import Scheme… expects.

Colour scheme only, no packaging step: Settings → Editor → Color Scheme → gear → Import Scheme… → pick dracula-nineties.icls or dracula-nineties-light.icls. Unnecessary once the plugin is installed, since each theme carries its own scheme with it.

Role mapping

The CSS assigns each accent a job in prose. The scheme keeps those jobs.

As of v1.20.0 the editor column is shared, not merely parallel. dracula-nineties.css paints highlight.js, pandoc and Prism classes inside pre and code from this same table, so a fenced code block in a document and the same code in the editor colour every token alike. Change a row here and the stylesheet’s highlight rules change with it. Types are the one slot that differs by nothing but name: the sheet calls the L+0.07 lift --purple-bright and recomputes it from --purple rather than restating the hex.

Token Hex Prose role Editor role
--on-surface #f8f8f2 body copy identifiers, locals, punctuation
--pink #e48bb7 h1, th keywords, operators, caret, active tab underline
--purple #a98ed6 h2, pre accent bar progress bar, predefined symbols; types at L+0.07 (#bfa4ed)
--green #7fc99a inline code strings, XML attribute values
--orange #e0a878 strong parameters, numbers, constants, TODO, search match
--link #8fc9d9 a functions and methods, focus ring, links
--label #b7bfe4 h3, sidenotes instance and static fields
--muted #979fc4 cite comments (italic), inlay hints
--rule-light #707388 hairlines line numbers, unused symbols
--red #f68281 n/a errors, deleted lines
--data-1..4 #99bdec #de8dc3 #74caa6 #bbc175 diagram categories VCS status, diff, log refs

The jobs are kept, but the weighting is not. Prose can afford a quiet tier because colour is sparse there; an editor colours nearly every glyph, so the same tier reads as wash. Punctuation sits at --on-surface rather than --label, and types take --purple at L+0.07 rather than plain. See Editor themes for the measurements and the three slot maps that were rendered and rejected.

The --data-* ramp stays on categorical things (diff, VCS, file colours) for the same reason it exists in the CSS: prose accents already mean something, and a category must not borrow them.

Greys and tinted backgrounds are not tokens. They are sRGB mixes over --surface, written in the templates as `` and resolved by scripts/create-themes.nu: the neutral ramp mixes toward --rule-light so it keeps the palette’s violet cast, and every diff, file-colour and search background is its accent at a fixed 10 / 20 / 28 / 35 percent.

Deviations from the CSS

This site is open source. Improve this page.