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A sepia theme for VS Code. A darkroom print, tinted by hand. Free to use, with no account required.
A darkroom print, tinted by hand — a sepia theme for VS Code.
The ground is the brown-black of a sepia shadow and the text is the cream of the paper, so the whole screen sits in one warm range with no blue light behind it. Colour comes the way it did on an old photograph: added by hand, sparingly.
Burnt sienna for keywords, ochre for types, a faded sage for strings, dusty rose for numbers. Calls take the pale blue a tinter kept for skies — the one cool colour on a warm print, so a function call never reads as plain text.
| role | colour | contrast |
|---|---|---|
keyword, storage, this | #E47F52 | 6.6:1 · italic |
| function, method | #CFE2EA | 13.9:1 |
| type, class, interface | #DAB46C | 9.5:1 |
| string | #AFBB8E | 9.1:1 |
| number, constant | #D69CB0 | 8.2:1 |
| property | #CFBD9C | 10.1:1 |
| annotation, decorator | #B7A6D0 | 8.3:1 · italic |
| variable | #E3D2B4 | 12.5:1 |
| parameter | #BFAD8E | 8.5:1 · italic |
| comment | #A08F74 | 5.9:1 · italic |
Comments, keywords, storage, this, parameters, annotations and attributes are the things you skim past or read as scaffolding. Slanting them separates them without spending another colour — which matters in a theme that keeps its colours as rationed as a hand-tinted print.
tool/build_themes.py refuses to write the theme if any syntax colour, UI label or terminal colour falls below 4.5:1 on its own background, or if two roles a reader must tell apart sit too close together. The lowest here is the comment colour at 5.91:1.
The build earned its keep on the first run: calls were a bright cream, and it refused the theme because they sat too close to plain text for anyone to tell apart. That is where the sky blue came from.
A theme cannot set your font — editor.fontFamily is a user setting. The italics are designed around Victor Mono, whose italic is cursive, but any monospace face with a real italic works:
"editor.fontFamily": "Victor Mono, JetBrains Mono, monospace",
"editor.fontSize": 15,
"editor.lineHeight": 1.7
Seven themes, each a different screen or medium, built the same way: one palette, contrast measured at build time, nothing below 4.5:1.
| theme | |
|---|---|
| ds_retro | green CRT with colour sparks |
| ds_amber | amber phosphor, warm and blue-free |
| ds_synthwave | neon on deep indigo |
| ds_paper | ink on warm paper — the light one |
| ds_blueprint | chalk lines on a navy drawing sheet |
| ds_noir | silver greys, one red, one gold |
| ds_sepia | a darkroom print, tinted by hand — this one |
MIT licensed, source on GitHub, free like everything else here.