ds_retro

A CRT theme for VS Code. Green at a glance, with sparks where they matter.

A dark theme for VS Code built from this site's own palette, on one rule: the screen should read green at a glance, the way a terminal does.

Most dark themes distribute colour evenly, so every file arrives as confetti. Here green carries the bulk of it — the ground, ordinary identifiers, function names, parameters — and the other hues are sparks spent only where two things must never be confused.

Two variants

ds_retro — green-dominant with retro colour sparks. The default.
ds_retro Phosphor — near-monochrome green, keywords in amber, for a long session when the sparks are too much.

Seven hues, and it still reads green

role	colour
keyword, storage, `this`	`#FF6AC1`	hot pink, italic — the one hue no green screen ever had
function, method	`#3DDC97`	mint, the site accent
type, class, interface	`#4FC3E8`	cyan
string	`#B8E986`	lime
number, constant	`#FF9E64`	orange
property	`#7BD4F0`	sky
annotation, decorator	`#C792EA`	violet, italic
parameter	`#8FC4AC`	italic
comment	`#5A8574`	italic

The impression stays green because the tokens that appear most often are the green ones. Frequency does the work, not restraint.

Italics are structural

Comments, keywords, storage, this, parameters, annotations and attributes are all things you either skim past or read as scaffolding. Slanting them separates them without spending another hue — which matters when the whole point is to spend hues sparingly.

Selection inverts to a solid block rather than a translucent wash. It is the single most terminal-feeling thing an editor can do.

Contrast is measured, not judged

tool/build_themes.py computes the WCAG ratio for every syntax role against its own background at build time and refuses to emit a theme with anything below 4.5:1. The worst in either variant is the comment colour at 4.79:1. Everything else clears AAA.

That is worth stating plainly because "dark theme with low-contrast comments" is the most common accessibility failure in this category, and the usual defence is that it was fine on the author's display.

Font

A theme cannot set your font — editor.fontFamily is a user setting. This one is designed around Victor Mono, whose italics are genuinely cursive, so the typeface does half the work:

"editor.fontFamily": "Victor Mono, JetBrains Mono, monospace",
"editor.fontSize": 15,
"editor.lineHeight": 1.7,
"editor.fontLigatures": false

IBM 3270, Departure Mono and JetBrains Mono all suit it, in descending order of how retro they read.

MIT licensed, source on GitHub, free like everything else here.