After more than a month of tweaking, I finally finished a new version of my low-contrast light theme for Visual Studio Code — Squirrelsong.
New and more cohesive grayscale palette, better UI readability and visual hierarchy, fewer distractions, lots of new colors.
I can’t use dark themes, and most light themes because the contrast is too high and colors are too bright. Such colors are too distracting for me, and I quickly get tired — not something you want if your job is to write code all day. Squirrelsong theme is low-contrast and uses soft colors, but still provide enough color and style variety to distinguish various elements of the code and avoid long chains of code printed in the same style.
I created the first version of this theme long before I learned about my neurodiversity, long before I learned that bright colors are, indeed, not good for my brain, and I need softer and milder colors and UI with fewer distractions.
Soft colors and low contrast are beneficial for neurodiverse people, such as those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, or high sensitivity (HSP). Such colors help reduce sensory overload and create a calming environment; they reduce distractions and visual clutter, so it’s easier to stay focused on your code instead of being distracted and overwhelmed by bright colors.
This might be the only color theme made specifically for neurodiverse and highly-sensitive developers, at least I haven’t seen any other so far…
Get it from Visual Studio Marketplace
P. S. Squirrelsong is also available for Alfred, CotEditor, Chrome, iTerm2, JetBrains, Marta File Manager, Midnight Commander, Nimble Commander, Prism, Slack, Sublime Text, Telegram, Terminal.app, Vivaldi, Warp, WezTerm, and more…
Top comments (4)
Looks cool 👍 What it takes to create themes for all these platforms you mentioned in the end? It looks like a big deal. Does it require separate work building the stuff from scratch, or you just kinda propagate the styling elsewhere with some sort of config?
Thanks! Always from scratch, unfortunately, often with very poor documentation if any. Debugging is also often difficult, or certain colors are unchangeable, or they are generated based on other colors or hardcoded (VS Code has many of these). Some apps (like Bear) don't have official theming, and it's quite a hack to use a custom theme there...
I didn’t even know Bear theme is customizable 😅 (big fan of Bear) that’s really great job, kudos 🔥
Well, kinda ;-) Hopefully, there will be an official way to do it soon...