Can you change IntelliJ colors on per project basis?

Question

I often have 2-4 projects open at the same time in IntelliJ IDEA 15. It quickly becomes confusing switching between them, especially when classes are similarly named. Is there any way to use a different color scheme, or change a visual component of the IDE to easily identify which project is open?

Update: As of IntelliJ IDEA 2016.2, the accepted answer is correct. When this was written I was using IntelliJ 15, and there was no way to accomplish this.

Answer 1

You may want to set a different background picture for each project to distinguish them from each other. This could also be a single solid color picture for example. Enter Cmd+Shift+A and search for the Set Background Image action (Ctrl+Shift+A on Windows).

Answer 2

Another possible solution might be to create different scopes for your projects and apply custom colors. Note: I see this more as a workaround because (IMHO) scopes should be mainly used 'in-project'. The downside with this solution is that you have also to handle the build-in scopes like Test.

Answer 3

My solution is based on the above - where I created a 1px x 1px coloured png and used it as the background image at.. Preferences > Appearance & Behaviour > Appearance and there's a button 'Background image' .. But .. I found that resizing my project window caused a huge lag in refreshing it to the new size. .. So .. I tried with a 200px x 200px image and resizing now works as normal. Make sure you also tick the 'This project only' option.

Answer 4

I've had the exact same issue with JetBrains products, so I built a plugin that solves exactly that, it gives you the option to choose different colors for the title bar, which is seen in the task view mode, and thus helps you differentiate between open projects by color!

You can download it by searching Project-Color in the JetBrains plugin marketplace window on your IDE, or from my GitHub repository, where you can find more usage examples and a detailed explanation of the available features.