Open sourceActiveNord Light
The Nord palette rebalanced for light backgrounds, from your IDE to your terminal.
- platform
- IDEs · Terminals · Desktop
- stack
- JetBrains plugin, VS Code extension, theme files
- license
- MIT
Overview
Nord, Sven Greb's arctic palette, was designed for dark themes. Nord Light brings it to light backgrounds: Snow Storm for the surfaces, Polar Night for the text, and the Frost and Aurora accents darkened by roughly 25-40% so they keep WCAG AA contrast on a light background.
The same palette ships as one port per tool, each in its own repository: a plugin for JetBrains IDEs, an extension for VS Code and compatible editors, themes for Kitty, Neovim, tmux and Zellij, and an Omarchy theme that colors the shell, Hyprland, terminals and editors. The terminal ports sit one step darker, on #E5E9F0, and in tmux and Zellij Nord Light pairs with Nord to follow the terminal's light or dark mode.
What it does
- Nord accents darkened by 25-40%, with WCAG AA contrast on light backgrounds
- One palette across seven tools, from the IDE to the desktop
- Terminal variants sit one step darker, with #E5E9F0 as the main background
- In tmux and Zellij, Nord and Nord Light swap automatically with light or dark mode
- On the JetBrains Marketplace, the VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX
- One repository per variant, all MIT licensed
Variants
| variant | description | install | links |
|---|---|---|---|
| JetBrains | UI theme and editor color scheme for every JetBrains IDE. | Settings → Plugins → Marketplace → Nord Light | GitHub ↗JetBrains Marketplace ↗ |
| Kitty | Terminal theme: switch back to Nord by changing the include. | include nord-light.conf | GitHub ↗ |
| Neovim | Pure Lua colorscheme, with Treesitter, LSP diagnostics and gitsigns.nvim. | { "nord-light/neovim", name = "nord-light", lazy = false, priority = 1000 } | GitHub ↗ |
| Omarchy | Desktop theme with its own wallpaper: Omarchy derives every app's colors from it. | omarchy theme install https://github.com/nord-light/omarchy-nord-light-theme.git | GitHub ↗ |
| tmux | Status bar theme; with tmux 3.6 it switches between Nord and Nord Light on its own. | source-file ~/.tmux/themes/nord-light.conf | GitHub ↗ |
| VS Code | Extension for VS Code and compatible editors such as Cursor and VSCodium. | code --install-extension IllegalStudio.nord-light-theme | GitHub ↗VS Code Marketplace ↗Open VSX ↗ |
| Zellij | Zellij theme; with theme_light it switches between Nord and Nord Light on its own. | theme "nord-light" | GitHub ↗ |