Inspired by the soft daylight and sea breezes of Istanbul, this theme blends calm turquoise tones with warm historical accents to create a serene yet expressive coding environment. Light, airy backgrounds keep the editor clean and comfortable, while teals, aquas, and muted golden hues add clarity and focus to essential syntax elements.
A light theme from the Codigrate Cities collection, released 2026-01-03. Tags: Mediterranean, Historic, Airy.
A free download from codigrate.com under the MIT licence: add it to your cart, enter the e-mail address the download link goes to, and get the theme file with its install steps.
Getting started on Codex
- Download the theme with the Download button. It is one file named after the theme, for example codigrate-london.tmTheme; keep the name as is.
- Move the file into your Codex themes folder, ~/.codex/themes/. If the folder is not there yet, create it in a terminal: mkdir -p ~/.codex/themes
- In Codex, type /theme and pick the theme from the list, for example codigrate-london.
- Codex keeps your terminal's background: for the full look, set your terminal's background to the theme's own.
Istanbul color palette
Every named color of the Istanbul palette, free to download for MacOS, CorelDRAW and Figma.
Istanbul on every platform
- Istanbul for JetBrains (free)
- Istanbul for Xcode ($2.99)
- Istanbul for VS Code (free)
- Istanbul for Chrome (free)
- Istanbul for Firefox (free)
- Istanbul for Open VSX (free)
- Istanbul for Slack (free)
- Istanbul for MacOS Terminal (free)
- Istanbul for iTerm2 (free)
- Istanbul for Ghostty (free)
- Istanbul for Claude Code (free)
- Istanbul for Codex (free), this page
- Istanbul for OpenCode (free)
- Istanbul for Rhino (free)
- Istanbul for Zed (free)
- Istanbul for Sublime Text (free)
- Istanbul for Line
From the blog
- Anatomy of a Light Theme: Istanbul: Anatomy of Istanbul, a light IDE theme: marble white backgrounds, a midnight teal foreground, and syntax in Iznik turquoise, rooftop red and bazaar copper.
