Change all Jupyter notebook background colors in PyCharm to white

Question

I've somehow changed the appearance of my PyCharm environment and now because my screen is not very bright I don't see a thing when it's sunny day.

It looks like this now:

So, I thought that changing theme from Darcula will help:

But the result is even worse:

I know that it's impossible to change output color from black but I think all other could be feasible. Could you give me steps to revert to default apperance? Normal white notebook would be best. Thanks.

Answer 1

This isn't answering the OP's question but may be useful for others who, like me, found this page when searching how to change plot background colours from black to white.

PyCharm > Preferences > Languages & Frameworks > Jupyter > (untick) Invert image outputs for dark themes

Note: changing your matplotlib rcParams won't help you here.

Answer 2

For changing Jupyter cell background color in PyCharm 2022.1.3, you can use:

Settings In left navigation menu: Editor > Color Scheme > Notebooks Color Scheme setting: Code cell background

See this example image: PyCharm 2022.1.3 Jupyter cell background color setting in Color Schema

It makes a lot of sense, but it took me a long time to find this option as there are simply so many miniscule settings. A strategy that worked for me in the end was creating a temporary color scheme by duplicating an existing one, and than search for "background" in the settings menu, and start changing all potentially relevant values.

It made it more problematic that I believed that the PyCharm project needed to be restarted in order to apply the color scheme settings as others mentioned for previous versions, but this appeared not to be an issue for me in the end. As soon as I clicked 'Apply', it adjusted the color scheme settings also in my Jupyter notebook.

Answer 3

In PyCharm 2019.1 to change the background color of the selected cell of a Jupyter notebook I did PyCharm > Preferences > Editor > Color Scheme > Jupyter > Selected Cell and unticked Background

Answer 4

For PyCharm 2019.1 on macOS HighSierra 10.13.6, I observed, that changing the theme of appearance to "Light" helps out. I remember, this used to be named "Default" in older versions of PyCharm. (Thereto, just as you described, go to Preferences -> Appearance & Behaviour -> Appearance, and select the appropriate theme in the drop-down menu.) However, the changes did only apply to jupyter notebook after closing and reopening the project.

In short: Restart or Reopening the Project after applying the changes should help.