Visual Studio Code Theme Generator

The Problem

• New themes are typically forked from other themes, carrying the bugs with them
• .tmThemes are overly verbose and difficult to maintain
• Themes are difficult to write from scratch

The Solution

What if all you needed to do to generate a theme was specify a few colors and everything else was handled for you? Well that's what this module aims to accomplish. All you need to do is specify a set of "base colors" (background, foreground and 4 accent colors) and you have a reasonably good looking theme.

All other VS Code theme colors are then derived from those base colors, with the option to tweak each underlying color as well.

Example

This is all that's needed to generate a great looking theme:

import { generateTheme, IColorSet } from 'vscode-theme-generator';
const colorSet: IColorSet = {
  base: {
    background: '#12171F',
    foreground: '#EFEFEF',
    color1: '#399EF4',
    color2: '#DA6771',
    color3: '#4EB071',
    color4: '#FFF099',
  }
};
generateTheme('My Theme', colorSet, path.join(__dirname, 'theme.json'));

Getting started

yarn add @moxer/vscode-theme-generator

Then import the generator and call it to generate a theme

In addition to the base colors, IColorSet provides more options for syntax, ui, and terminal. There is also an overrides property, which allows you to set any color key from the Theme Color Reference directly.

Since the theme is defined in TypeScript, you can create an object to give names to colors you want to re-use.

import { generateTheme, IColorSet } from '@moxer/vscode-theme-generator';

const colors = {
  red: '#DA6771',
  green: '#4EB071',
  yellow: '#FFF099',
  blue: '#399EF4',
  blueLight: '#9FCFF9'
}

const colorSet: IColorSet = {
  base: {
    // Determines the overall background color
    background: '#12171F',
    // Determines the overall text foreground color
    foreground: '#EFEFEF',
    // Determines boolean, identifier, keyword, storage, and cssClass
    color1: colors.blue,
    // Determines string, stringEscape, and cssId
    color2: colors.red,
    // Determines function, class, classMember, type, and cssTag
    color3: colors.green,
    // Determines functionCall and number
    color4: colors.yellow
  },
  /**
    * Overrides specific syntax groups provided
    * by the theme generator (see above comment lines)
    */
  syntax: {
    identifier: colors.blueLight,
    string: colors.red
  },
  ui: {
    cursor: '#FFFFFF'
  },
  terminal: {
    blue: colors.blue,
    brightBlue: colors.blueLight
  },
  workbench: {
    'editorGutter.modifiedBackground': colors.green,
    'editorGutter.addedBackground': colors.blue,
    'editorGutter.deletedBackground': colors.red
  },
  customTokens: [
    {
      name: 'String',
      scope: [
        'string',
      ],
      settings: {
        fontStyle: 'normal',
        foreground: '#00ff00'
      }
    }
  ]
};

generateTheme('My Theme', colorSet, path.join(__dirname, 'theme.json'));

The syntax properties present a simplified set of token types. If not set, these will be derived from the base colors:

• color1 determines boolean, identifier, keyword, storage, and cssClass
• color2 determines string, stringEscape, and cssId
• color3 determines function, class, classMember, type, and cssTag
• color4 determines functionCall and number

By default, comment is derived from the background color, and modifier and markdownQuote are not set.

The ui properties allow you to set colors for various highlights and a few other things:

• cursor: the cursor color
• invisibles: used for visible whitespace (see the editor.renderWhitespace VS Code setting)
• guide: indentation guidelines in the editor pane
• lineHighlight: colors the line your cursor is on, in place of the boundary lines
• findMatchHighlight and currentFindMatchHighlight: highlights matches from the find widget
• findRangeHighlight: highlights the selected area for "find in selection"
• rangeHighlight: background for a selected range of lines
• selection: highlights text selected with the cursor
• selectionHighlight: highlights text which matches the selected text
• wordHighlight: when the cursor is on a symbol, highlights places that symbol is read
• wordHighlightStrong: when the cursor is on a symbol, highlights places that symbol is written
• activeLinkForeground: color of hyperlinks when clicked

By default, invisibles and guide are derived from the background color, and the rest are not set.

The terminal properties include each of the standard 16 ANSI colors (black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, and white, plus their "bright" counterparts). To set the background color, add the terminal.background key under overrides.

Support

Support below means that the standard VS Code grammar has explicit support for the languages, ie. the colors should match their meanings. Other languages will probably still look alright but there is no guarantee that they will.

• :white_check_mark: C#
• :white_check_mark: CSS
• :white_check_mark: SASS
• :white_check_mark: PostCSS
• :white_check_mark: HTML
• :white_check_mark: Java
• :white_check_mark: JavaScript (+ JSX)
• :white_check_mark: TypeScript (+ TSX)
• :white_check_mark: Markdown
• :white_check_mark: Python
• :white_check_mark: Perl
• :white_check_mark: C++
• :white_check_mark: C#

Development

npm run watch

Then in VS Code press F5 to build demo and launch the debugger with the generated themes available to switch to.