I want to target several areas of my setup, in no particular order: IDE, terminal, desktop, general Mac aesthetic, even my desk (and maybe my room?).

The first edition is all about my IDE since that is where I spend most of the time.. reading Claude’s code. Haha. Thankfully I still write and edit code for a fair amount of time, so who says I can’t have a bongo cat typing along with me? 🐱

The vibe

1. Light mode: don’t come at me but I find light mode easier to read and more relaxing, especially on IDEs
2. Kawaii: think pastels, cute animals, sparkles, the works 💖
3. Basically anything that is even mildly cute lol

But hey, this is what I’m feeling at this moment. Maybe a few months down the line, I might want a crazy techno theme 🤷🏻‍♀️

The setup

I use Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm, WebStorm, IntelliJ), and I used Google + Claude to find suggestions, to varying degrees of success. Let’s get down to the brass (or rather pastel) tacks!

Area 1: Theme

This proved to be unnecessarily tricky, given my requirements. I really wanted something in purple but unfortunately all purple themes are violently dark :(
Although I will highly recommend fairyfloss - it is a beautiful dark purple theme and will be my go-to if and when I ever switch back to dark mode!

The winner: Sakura

Other considerations:

1. Cute Pink Light: a very close second
2. Catppuccin Latte: idk what kind of marketing these guys have done but these Catppuccin themes pop up in every single recommendation. It was too white/stark for me
3. Mocha Mouse Light: found it to be really beautiful and warm, saving this for a chocolatey-themed setup in the future! 🍫

..and other themes that I don’t care to remember at this point.

Area 2: Font

The default JetBrains Mono is a beautiful font. No notes.

Area 3: Editor

Rainbow Brackets: for some reason I can’t get it to work anymore
Rainbow Indent

And my favourite - Bongo Cat! Need I say more? I may get annoyed with this soon but for now, it makes me chuckle!

Area 4: Cuties

I wanted one of those baby animals that pop up in your status bar or toolbar and do random things like wave, say stuff etc And I did find some that hit the mark perfectly!

Pets

Pets - they hang out with each other, play and groove to a tune that only they can hear. You know that fuzzy feeling you get when you watch cat videos? This is that, but a lightweight, portable, low-res, v0.1 version of it 🐱🐶🐰

Nyan Cat Loader

Indexing a big project? No worries, Nyan Cat is here to give you company. Pycharm hogging your RAM and still refusing to load files? Nyan Cat is working hard to get it to behave. Installing a plugin? Nyan Cat is there to approve it 🌈

That’s all for this edition! 🩷
Tip for the noobs like me: sign in to Jetbrains to sync your settings across all your IDEs so that every project has that cutesy goodness out-of-the-box :)