Ellora

Mood-based dark themes. Pick how you're coding today.

_{There's a trick hidden in the mood picker. Good luck.}

Every "dark" theme I owned was actually grey. Grey glows on OLED. The pure-black themes on the marketplace fix the background and forget everything else: comments you can't read, terminals left at default colors, diff views that look like a different product.

So I built the theme I wanted. Then I kept going and built twelve of them.

The idea is simple: you don't code the same way at 10am as you do at 2am, so why stare at the same colors? Ellora ships a family of moods and (optionally) asks once a day which one fits. That's it. No AI, no tracking, no journaling. Just atmospheres.

The moods

The core moods sit on true #000000 for OLED panels.

Comments stay readable in every single mood. That was rule one and it's checked by a script, not by my eyeballs.

How you switch

• Click the small ring button at the top right of any editor
• Or the mood emoji in the status bar
• Or Ctrl+Shift+J (⌘⇧J on Mac)

Arrow keys preview each mood live before you commit. Esc puts everything back the way it was.

Typing works too, and it understands you: type sad and you'll get Quiet, angry gets Sprint, nord gets Frost, tired gets Late Night. The picker never labels your feelings back at you, it just knows what you meant.

The daily question

On your first window of the day, Ellora can ask:

Good evening. How are you coding today?

Yesterday's mood is already selected, so keeping it is one press of Enter.

Some ground rules I hold myself to:

1. It asks at most once a day.
2. One Esc dismisses it, no questions asked.
3. "Don't ask again" means never, and it syncs to your other machines.
4. Besides one heads-up right after install, there are no notifications. Ever. No badges, no release notes popups, no "enjoying Ellora? rate us!".
5. Uninstalling leaves your theme exactly where it was.

If the ritual isn't your thing, run Ellora: Pin Current Mood and it goes permanently quiet.

Auto mode

Set "ellora.mode": "auto" and the editor follows your day instead of asking: Focus in the morning, Deep Space through the afternoon, Flow in the evening, and candlelit Late Night after 11pm. It only switches when you come back to the window, never under your cursor, and you can remap every time slot in ellora.schedule.

Yes, this means your editor gets warmer as the night gets later. It's the feature I use most.

One more thing

There's a hidden trick in the mood picker: type a certain word into the search box instead of a mood name, and instead of filtering the list, your whole editor lights up. Every mood pulses through in rhythm, a ten-second beat through the entire family, then it quietly settles back on whatever you were using. That's the part people screen-record.

The trigger isn't listed anywhere on purpose. If you want it handed to you, it's a one-word instruction and it's not hard to find in the source.

Commands

Under the hood, briefly

Twelve of the moods are generated from a single token file, and every build runs a contrast audit: body text has to clear WCAG AAA (7:1), comments and syntax colors have to clear 4.5:1, and git/diff colors need enough luminance separation to work for colorblind folks. If a color fails, the build fails. The audit has caught my own bad picks more than once.

Everything is themed: terminal ANSI, diffs, merge conflicts, peek views, minimap, notebooks, semantic tokens, the command palette. No half-painted corners.

Settings I'd pair with it

{
  "editor.fontFamily": "JetBrains Mono, Cascadia Code, monospace",
  "editor.fontLigatures": true,
  "editor.lineHeight": 1.6,
  "editor.minimap.renderCharacters": false
}

MIT © Dhruv Singh·