Xcode Color Themes

A small collection of my preferred dark color themes for Xcode, from June 2010. I used the teliaz theme as my daily driver for years. Honest status update (2026): the download links below are dead — the teliaz.com/files directory is long gone, and the files don’t exist in the Wayback Machine either. The post survives for the record, with working alternatives for modern Xcode further down.

The original 2010 themes

Three themes were on offer: teliaz (my own), Ego, and Humane. Each was a .xccolortheme file installed by dropping it into ~/Library/Application Support/Xcode/Color Themes/. I’ve re-created the teliaz theme from the wayback-era screenshots; paste this into TeliazTheme.xccolortheme if you want it back:

mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/Xcode/Color\ Themes
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Xcode/Color\ Themes

# The original download URLs are dead (teliaz.com/files is gone, and the
# Wayback Machine never captured the files). Recreate the theme file by hand:

# TeliazTheme.xccolortheme — reconstructed 2026, original lost
{
    "DVTSourceTextBackground" = "0.121 0.129 0.160 1.000";
    "DVTSourceTextInsertionPointColor" = "0.900 0.900 0.900 1.000";
    "DVTSourceTextSelectionColor" = "0.280 0.360 0.500 1.000";
    "DVTSourceTextBlockHighlightColor" = "0.140 0.160 0.220 1.000";
    "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColors" = {
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorPlainText" = "0.870 0.870 0.870 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorComments" = "0.420 0.500 0.420 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorDocComments" = "0.420 0.500 0.420 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorStrings" = "0.960 0.620 0.360 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorCharacters" = "0.960 0.620 0.360 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorNumbers" = "0.640 0.780 0.920 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorKeywords" = "0.920 0.450 0.550 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorIdentifiers" = "0.870 0.870 0.870 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorTypeIdentifiers" = "0.560 0.820 0.800 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorPreprocessorDirectives" = "0.750 0.650 0.900 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorURLs" = "0.560 0.730 0.920 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorAttributes" = "0.920 0.700 0.450 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorProjectIdentifiers" = "0.950 0.850 0.500 1.000";
        "DVTSourceTextSyntaxColorOtherIdentifiers" = "0.870 0.870 0.870 1.000";
    };
}

(Old dead URLs, kept for the record: teliaz.com/files/apple/TeliazTheme.xccolortheme, .../XCodeColorTheme.xccolortheme (Ego), .../Humane.xccolortheme.)

The Ego theme used DejaVu Sans Mono at 12pt — a font some readers knew as “Panic Sans” from Panic’s Coda, which is a repackaged version of it. You can still grab the font at dejavu-fonts.org.

Dark themes for Xcode in 2026

The install mechanism hasn’t changed: Xcode still picks up any .xccolortheme file from ~/Library/Application Support/Xcode/Color Themes/ — restart Xcode, then choose it under Xcode ▸ Settings ▸ Fonts & Colors. The practical difference is that you no longer need my hand-rolled files; maintained collections exist:

• hdoria/xcode-themes — a large collection of ported themes with screenshots, the closest thing to this post’s original purpose.
• bojan/xcode-one-dark — Atom’s One Dark, still the most requested dark scheme.
• cargath/WWDC2016-Xcode-Color-Scheme — a clean scheme based on the WWDC 2016 invitation.

Xcode’s built-in dark themes (Default (Dark), Low Key, Presentation) have also gotten good enough that many developers no longer install one at all. Still, if you’re the kind of person who was hunting for a dark Xcode theme in 2010, you probably haven’t changed either. Happy coding.