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Dec 11 2023

Making Monochrome Dark

Last Edit: Dec 11 2023

jtpotato's Monochrome Dark is a VSCode theme I built for almost no good reason.

Ever wanted to cry over how colourless and desaturated a VSCode theme could be? Ever hated the brighter themes like One Dark because of the presence of colour?

(oh my gosh how horrifying)

Introducing jtpotato's Monochrome Dark. It is seriously dark. And monochrome. Colours are diluted in a sea of white, while black and grey and are forever bound to within 5px of the centre of the colour wheel...

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Okay in all seriousness though, this theme was designed to be clean ✨. Here are a few of our design philosophies.

Lines still needed to be somewhat visible, but not distracting.

Pretty self explanatory - high contrast themes can pretty easily hurt your eyes with how many lines there are to track on screen. I wanted this theme to be relatively high contrast but slightly less painful to look at.

Contrast to establish visual hierarchy

Seriously, nobody needs to know where await is. Even if it's super faint, it should still be pretty obvious.

(Unless you need the higher contrast ratio to read - in which case, I'm sorry, but this is not the theme for you. There are reasons why people don't usually design themes like this)

Text decorations... to do exactly the same thing

If something is really worth your attention, it's in bold. It just makes sense. Italics also make things interesting and stand out slightly too. But because it's less clear when italics are more/less important than regular style text, this is used in combination with contrast

Colour to differentiate

One thing I noticed when working with grey is that everything looks the same. Using extremely small amounts of colour is practically unavoidable, just so that I can keep the comments separate from the function definitions they are trying to label.

This also lets me keep the comments dark enough so that even if they are a massive license block at the top of the file, you won't accidentally start reading the license unless you really try

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If you like what you're seeing, maybe give it a try.

I promise you'll regret it, but not for the first 20 seconds 🙏