🎄 Fiestas — VS Code Theme

Fiestas is a Christmas-inspired VS Code theme made for coding while waiting for the end-of-year holidays. Because even debugging feels better with a bit of festive glow ✨

Happy Holidays!

✨ Why Fiestas?

Ever since I started using VS Code, I dreamed of fully customizing it. I came from Sublime Text, where I had already played around with themes and styles, so the excitement was real. But after some Googling, I quickly realized that thousands of people had already created thousands of amazing themes. Until I stumbled upon Synthwave ’84. Then the inspiration came back. After digging into its source code, the idea of “just changing colors” evolved into pushing customization a bit further. I ran several experiments (some of which I shared on Twitter), and this one ended up being my favorite.

And honestly—what better time to release a theme like this than during the holiday season? 🎆

🎆 Enabling the fireworks

Open your command palette with:

• Ctrl + Shift + P (Windows / Linux)
• Shift + ⌘ + P (macOS)

Then select “Enable fireworks”.

You’ll be prompted to restart VS Code. After that… enjoy the lights! ✨

⚠️ Disclaimer

Fiestas is a purely experimental theme. It may contain bugs or unexpected behavior and is not meant to be used as a daily work theme. Think of it as a fun seasonal experience rather than a production setup.

Feel free to explore the code in the repository and use it at your own risk.
If for any reason VS Code refuses to open, a fresh reinstall will fix the issue.

🛠 Removing the corruption warning and [unsupported] title bar

Just like Synthwave ’84, Fiestas modifies core VS Code files. Because of this, VS Code may flag the installation as “corrupted” and show a warning message asking you to restart.

This warning is safe to ignore.
If you prefer to remove it entirely, you can use the
Fix VSCode Checksums extension.

Steps:

1. Install Fix VSCode Checksums
2. Open the command palette
3. Run Fix Checksums: Apply
4. Fully restart VS Code (a simple reload may not be enough)

🔄 Updates

Every time VS Code updates, you’ll need to repeat the checksum fix to re-enable the effect.

🌙 Disabling/Uninstalling

To disable the fireworks:

• Open your command palette with:
  • Ctrl + Shift + P (Windows / Linux)
  • Shift + ⌘ + P (macOS)
• Select Disable fireworks”.

🤝 Contributing

I’m not really expecting contributions, this project was created purely for fun.

That said, if you feel inspired, feel free to fork the repository and explore how the canvas-based animations work. This technique opens up many creative possibilities.

💜 Thanks

Massive thanks to Robb Owen for creating Synthwave ’84. Fiestas is heavily inspired by it, and several parts of the codebase were reused. Thanks Robb for showing me that VS Code theming could go way beyond colors. Because of that, I now have a mental backlog of experimental themes I can’t wait to build! The colors part was done using the Theme Studio for VS Code