Sequoia takes its colors from the floor of a redwood forest: a deep, shaded ground in olive and charcoal, bark in every shade of brown, the red of the trees themselves, and high above it all the green of a canopy catching the light. The job of the theme is to keep that forest on screen while you work, dark enough to rest in and warm enough to feel alive. Here is how Sequoia is built, color by color, and why each one sits where it does. It is the earthy cousin of the cool Aurora Borealis teardown and the light Everest one.
A Forest In A Palette
The source description sets the brief in one breath. Deep blacks and browns wrap the editor in a calm, focused atmosphere, while accents of vibrant green illuminate the interface, mirroring the vitality of the trees. So the structure of the theme is the forest floor, dark and warm, and the color is everything that grows out of it, rationed against the dark.
You can read the whole palette as that one scene. The ground is a family of near black olive charcoals, the editor #20231C and the panels just above it. The life is the small set of colors on top: a vibrant moss green #73A621 for the accent that runs through the interface, and earth tones for the code, the browns, reds and golds of bark and light.
The Harmony: Earth And Leaf Together
Where Everest was built on a single complementary pair and Aurora on a cool analogous glow, Sequoia is built on the warm earth half of the wheel, lifted by green. Lay its colors out and they run from the bark tans and redwood reds near 20 and 30 degrees, through the golden light around 40, and on into the leaf and pine greens near 100 and 160. That is a long analogous sweep across the warm and green side of the wheel, the same span you see looking from a tree trunk up to its leaves.
It works because these are colors that already belong together in nature. Bark, soil, redwood and new leaf are never jarring side by side, so a palette drawn from them reads as one calm place rather than a set of unrelated highlights. The one cool note, a lichen teal, sits at the far end of the sweep like the blue green that creeps across old wood in shade.
Backgrounds, Built In Layers
A dark theme lives or dies on its neutrals, and Sequoia never draws a hard line between panels. It stacks three near neutrals and lets a small step of lightness do the dividing:
- Surface #394132, the outermost frame the window sits in.
- Window #32382C, the tool windows, tabs and panels.
- Editor #20231C, the page your code is written on, the darkest of the three.
None of these is a flat grey. Each is an olive charcoal, the green of the forest pulled almost all the way down to black, so the dark has warmth in it. When something becomes active or selected the theme reaches for a true bark brown, around #533930, so even the highlights come from wood rather than from a generic blue.
One Foreground, Several Voices
The reading happens on the foreground, and Sequoia leans on one main color for it: a soft grey #BABEBA, not pure white. Against the near black editor that lands the contrast comfortably, bright enough to read all day, 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 sage grey #849184, and comments go further still into a warm taupe #6C625A 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 color.
Syntax: The Colors Of The Forest
Open a file and the forest fills in. The structure of the language is painted in things you would find among the trees:
- Keywords in a bark tan #A67B5B, so the shape of the language reads as the wood it is built from.
- Strings and numbers in a golden light #A68F59, the literal values warm and grouped like sun through leaves.
- Local variables in a redwood terracotta #A86255 and globals in a deeper bark brown #854F3C, the reds of the trees themselves.
- Fields and methods in a leaf green #6E9F56, static members in a pine teal green #369772, and annotations in a lichen teal #60A0A8.
- Comments in that quiet taupe from the foreground ladder, so they read as notes pinned to the bark.
Line them up and they are the forest itself: browns and reds for the wood, golds for the light, greens for the growth. Because the whole set stays on the earth toned, low saturation side of the wheel, the code reads as one settled place rather than a scatter of bright signals.
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Reading It Back
Put the pieces together and the theme tells one story. A near black olive floor gives depth without ever going to a flat black. A soft grey foreground, stepped down through sage and taupe, keeps the reading calm. An earthy palette, bark and redwood through gold into leaf green, carries the syntax in the colors of the forest, with one vibrant green accent for new growth. Every color is doing a job, and the jobs all point back to the same stand of trees.
Want to try it in the editor you already work in? Sequoia installs on JetBrains, VS Code, Cursor, Chrome, Slack and Ghostty, all from its theme page.
