🌤️ Solarized and Selenized 🌖 for VS Code

Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed by Ethan Schoonover.

Selenized is a redesign on Solarized by Jan Warchoł. It improves on Solarized by providing better contrast and more distinguishable accent colors.

The color values and comparison between both can be seen in this blog post.

This extension contains the following color themes and variants:

• Selenized Light 🌖
• Selenized Dark 🌒
• Solarized Light
• Solarized Dark

Screenshots

Workbench (UI)

(Selene) Selenized Light 🌖 and Dark 🌒

Editor

(Selene) Selenized Light 🌖 and Dark 🌒

Templatized color theme files

Maintaining loose vscode color theme extension JSON files with raw sRGB values is tedious. So, I broke them up into shareable components as Liquid template partials.

Let's take a look at a top-level selenized/light-color-theme.json.liquid file, for instance. This file compiles to the unwieldy vscode color theme file Selenized_Light-color-theme.json. However, the "source" template itself is quite simple:

{% render
  "_selenized-color-theme.json.liquid",
    type: "light",
    colors: palette.colors,
-%}

Where _selenized-color-theme.json.liquid is a Selenized color theme template that can be instantiated in dark or light variant with the injected variable type.

Taking this idea further, the content of that template is further broken down into its constituents parts: Workbench (UI) colors, TextMate scoped token (fallback) colors, and semantic syntax token (LSP-provided) colors.

{%- assign colors = colors | map: "srgb_hex" -%}

{
  "name": "Selenized {{ type | capitalize }}",
  "type": "{{ type }}",

  // Workbench (UI) colors
  "colors": {% render
    "workbench-colors.json.liquid",
    type: type,
    base16cs: colors,
  %},

  // TextMate scoped token highlight colors (fallback)
  "tokenColors": {% render
    "token-colors.json.liquid",
    base16cs: colors,
  %},

  // Semantic token (LSP-provided) colors
  "semanticHighlighting": true,
  "semanticTokenColors": {% render
    "semantic-token-colors.json.liquid",
    base16cs: colors,
  %}
}

As you can see, each component template is injected with a theme-agnostic array of 16 base colors. They roughly follow the Base16 color theming framework.

What this means is that colors, tokenColors, and semanticTokenColors can now be expressed in terms of color variable names that are independent of the target color theme. For example:

{%- assign fg_0 =     base16cs[4] %}
{%- assign orange =   base16cs[9] %}

...

  {
    "name": "Language Constants",
    "scope": [
      "constant.language",
      "support.constant",
      "variable.language"
    ],
    "settings": {
      "foreground": "#{{ orange }}"
    }
  },
  {
    "name": "Variables",
    "scope": [
      "variable",
      "variable.parameter",
      "support.variable"
    ],
    "settings": {
      "foreground": "#{{ fg_0 }}"
    }
  },

This also keeps things DRY. The same template files are shared between Selenized Light, Selenized Dark, Solarized Light, and Solarized Dark--the four colorschemes that are defined in this repository. It makes tweaking colors a lot easier and maintenance much less tedious.

These three core components are defined as three template partials files in common/ directory.

Palette for color values injection

The templates (and the shared components partials that they instantiate) are injected with color values that are derived from one of the palette files. Each of them is defined as a yaml file that contains 16 colors (per Base16 convention).

Each color in a palette has a name and index in a colors array. Its canonical values are in CIE L*a*b* colorspace. The palette file must first be processed to convert those values into sRGB, and then into Liquid objects before they can be injected into the templates for rendering the final vscode JSON files.

For more information

• Theme Color
• Visual Studio Code extension guide: Color Theme
• Semantic coloring in Color Themes