How to remove material theme (or reset to defaults) from IntelliJ / PyCharm?

None of these worked for me as an acceptable solution. So here is what I figured out:

  1. Go to plugins, uninstall Material UI.
  2. Ensure colour scheme is Default/Darcula.
  3. Restart Idea.

At this point most changes were back to default, but some things like colour of current tab, error highlights, modified files etc were still not back to usual. So I followed the advice of deleting config and things returned to normal. But with this option you lose everything, even the installed plugins. And worst thing was, I was using a settings repository to sync settings, few minutes later the colours were back! So I did a diff with older config directory and then a git log revealed that these files are the culprits.

Delete these 4 files from this path: .IntelliJIdea<version>/config/settingsRepository/repository/

  1. colors/_@user_Darcula.icls
  2. colors/_@user_Default.icls
  3. material_custom_theme. xml
  4. material_theme.xml

Then do a git commit and git push to ensure these are synced to your repository. And finally theme was back to normal!


you can go to the Preferences->Plugins on the search bar, type Material UI then press on the Uninstall button .


You should:

  1. Go to Settings->Plugins and remove Material UI plugin
  2. Switch to Default theme in Settings->Editor->Color Scheme

If it does not help (it happened to me) and you still have some colors/fonts from removed Material UI - looks like Material UI theme override some default colors. You should then close Intellij, go to Intellij config folder (on Windows it is C:/Users/<your username>/.IntellijIdeaXXXX.X/config) and remove this config folder and restart Intellij. It should show you a dialog window to import settings from previous version or use defaults (like when you install Intellij and make the first start). After that everything will be switched to default colors/fonts.


From the material-theme-jetbrains repo:

File Colors stuck after uninstallation The File Status Colors feature is also a feature that sticks outside of the realm of the plugin as it modifies the IDE itself. Therefore when uninstalling/disabling the plugin the colors will stuck.

If you want to reset to the default colors, open the Settings at Version Control -> File Status Colors in 2017.3+. In previous versions, you will need to go to the config directory and delete the _@user_Darcula.icls color scheme manually.