I usually stick with a theme that I like for a while. From Atom's One Dark to Dracula to, more recently, the Material Theme. And, for the most part, I liked how the themes looked, and besides changing the editor font-family, I didn't change any of the theme settings.
Despite that, creating a theme has been an item on my bucket list for a while, so I decided to give it a try.
I can't thank Sarah Drasner enough for her fantastic tutorial on Creating a VS Code Theme. The tutorial was my home page for the past few days while I worked on my version.
The tutorial is complete and explains everything from creating your Microsoft Publisher account (required to publish your extensions) to using an excellent generator to bootstrap your extension and her insights on the research she did for choosing the correct colors for the theme.
I highly recommend that you check the article if you intend to develop your theme.
Theme appearance
The theme is a dark one, which uses a very dark shade of gray as the primary background color, the main accent colors are purple and blue, while lighter shades of gray are used for the primary foreground colors.
The theme has basic terminal colors support, which the Git status also uses.
I've created a basic CodePen with all the colors I used while creating the theme, check it out: Nevermore Theme colors.
Design decisions
The main inspiration for the theme was the poem: The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. It inspired me to create the dark basis and setting the primary accent colors. But I needed some lighter colors for some tokens to get enough contrast. Having too darks fonts everywhere would make the eyes tired faster, that's where the lighter shades of the accent colors come into play.
Another decision of mine was to use italics to highlight some code tokens. I chose that because my current font Dank Mono looks so good in italics that I tried to use it as much as possible. But I'm aware that not everyone uses or likes it. Therefore I also created a no italics version of the theme.
It's live. What comes next?
I created the theme mainly for myself and as a creative exercise, but now that I launched it as an open-source project, I intend to maintain and keep improving it in the future.
I am sure there are some issues, especially with supporting languages that I'm not currently using, so I would love feedback and ideas on how to improve on these areas.
If you want to try the theme, you can get it for free on the Visual Studio Marketplace by clicking here.
To file an issue or contribute to the project, check the GitHub repo.
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