Redemption

VS Code's built-in Red theme, redeemed: untouched except for one thing, the cursor.

Red paints the cursor #970000 on an editor background of #390000 — dark red on darker red, a contrast ratio of about 2:1 — so it tends to vanish into the wallpaper. This theme swaps it for the gold (#fec758) that Red already uses for entity names and headings, lifting the contrast to about 11.5:1. Everything else is Red's palette, copied verbatim from the theme that ships with VS Code.

Install

Grab the .vsix from a release, or build it yourself:

bun install
bun run package

Then install it into VS Code:

code --install-extension redemption-1.0.0.vsix

Pick Redemption from Preferences: Color Theme (Ctrl+K Ctrl+T).

The change

-	"editorCursor.foreground": "#970000",
+	"editorCursor.foreground": "#fec758",

That's it. That's the theme.

Credits

The palette is Microsoft's Red theme shipped with VS Code, itself a conversion of red.tmTheme by 1ClickComputing from the Colorsublime Themes collection. Both are MIT-licensed, and so is this derivative; see the LICENSE file. The dark-red caret, by the way, has been there since the 2015 original — the cursor has been hiding for over a decade.