Core Theme

A Visual Studio Code extension that provides a configurable colour theme. It strives to minimise colour variation and visual clutter for maximum focus.

(Preview capture also uses Core Icon Theme.)

Features

• The colour set for syntax highlighting is distilled down to four rough categories: keywords, literals, documentation (comments) and catch-all for everything else. Having a fifth for types (names) would be great, but the TextMate grammar approach to providing colouring scopes is limited in how accurate it can be. If semantic highlighting is available, the theme should take advantage of that for better accuracy of what it does cover.
• With all remaining visual elements, colours have been assigned manually and as parsimoniously as possible. Many items are also deliberately hidden, particularly those that are predominantly decorative in nature. Some care has also been taken as to not completely cripple an editor feature by occluding or blending visual elements into ambiguity.
• Colour assignments can be customised using the colour keys setting (coreTheme.colorKeys) available in the settings section for this extension. Assigning invalid colour key values, or leaving them empty, will result in strange visuals. The canonical list of colour keys may change later.

Note

This theme is available as a web extension, but it loses the ability to be configured, thus only the default colour key settings shipped will apply.

Notes

• The coreTheme.updateTemplate command is only available in development builds of the extension and is used for tracking any new tokens targeting new visual elements in future VS Code versions.