Aurora Borealis takes its colors from a clear night sky far enough north to see the lights: a deep blue dark with ribbons of green drawn across it, fading up into blue and, on the rare best nights, into violet and rose. The job of the theme is to keep that night sky on screen while you work, calm enough to read for hours. Here is how Aurora is built, color by color, and why each one sits where it does. Its light twin, Everest, gets the same teardown.
The Northern Lights In A Palette
The source description sets the brief in one breath. Dark blues and teals serve as the backdrop, while lighter accents echo the ethereal colors of the Northern Lights, all of it tuned to be easy on the eyes so you can focus. So the structure of the theme is the night, deep and quiet, and the color is the aurora, rationed out as light against it.
You can read the whole palette as the two halves of that scene. The night is a family of deep blue greys, the editor #142B37 and the panels just above it. The aurora is the small set of colors that glow on top: a glacial sky blue #7AC6F5 for the accent and a Northern Lights green #049682 for the active highlight, the two colors a real aurora shows most often.
The Harmony: A Cool Analogous Glow
Where Everest was built on a single complementary pair, cold against warm, Aurora is built the opposite way, on colors that sit close together. Drop its two signature accents on the color wheel and the sky blue lands near 203 degrees and the aurora green near 172, only about thirty degrees apart. Colors that close are analogous, the most cohesive relationship there is, and that is exactly why a real aurora reads as one glowing thing rather than separate colors fighting. The blues, teals and greens all belong to one cool family.
The syntax stretches that family a little further, up the wheel into the violets and magentas that a strong aurora throws off at high altitude. So the full set sweeps from green through teal and blue into violet, a single arc across the cool half of the wheel. Nothing in it is warm, which is what keeps the theme feeling like cold night air.
Backgrounds, Built In Layers
A dark theme lives or dies on its neutrals just as a light one does, and Aurora never draws a hard line between panels. It stacks three near neutrals and lets a small step of lightness do the dividing:
- Surface #1A3746, the outermost frame the window sits in.
- Window #123243, the tool windows, tabs and panels.
- Editor #142B37, the page your code is written on, a deep blue grey rather than a flat black, so the night has colour in it.
None of these is pure black on purpose. Black against bright text makes the harshest contrast there is, and it shows every halo and smudge a screen can throw. A deep blue grey keeps the contrast in a gentler band and reads as a night sky, which is the whole point.
One Foreground, Several Voices
The reading happens on the foreground, and Aurora leans on one main color for it: a soft grey #B0B9BE, not pure white. Against the deep blue editor that lands the contrast comfortably, bright enough to read all night, soft enough that it never glares the way white on black can.
From that one anchor the theme builds its quiet hierarchy. Secondary text drops to a muted slate blue #85A2B3, and comments go further still into a soft lavender #A996B9 set in italic, so your notes sit behind your code without vanishing. That is the same contrast ladder from the readability post: importance read as lightness, not as another loud colour.
Syntax: The Aurora's Own Colors
Open a file and the sky lights up. The structure of the language is painted in the aurora's real bands:
- Keywords in a magenta #BB719B, the rare high band of the aurora, so the shape of the language is the first thing you see.
- Strings and numbers in a clear blue #549EFF, the literal values reading as one calm group.
- Functions and globals in a Northern Lights green #73D379, local variables in a teal #05C0A6, and methods in the sky blue accent #7ACEF5.
- Parameters in a soft violet #BAA5FF and comments in that same quiet lavender from the foreground ladder.
Line them up and they are the aurora itself: green most of all, then blue and teal, with violet and magenta saved for the parts that change. Because the whole set stays on the cool, glowing side of the wheel, the code reads as one continuous light rather than a scatter of unrelated colours.
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Reading It Back
Put the pieces together and the theme tells one story. A deep blue night gives depth without ever going black. A soft grey foreground, stepped down through slate and lavender, keeps the reading calm. A cool analogous palette, green through blue into violet, carries the syntax in the aurora's own colors. Every color is doing a job, and the jobs all point back to the same northern sky.
Want to try it in the editor you already work in? Aurora Borealis installs on JetBrains, VS Code, Cursor, Chrome, Slack and Ghostty, all from its theme page.
