Umber Calm

A warm, low-glare dark theme with measured contrast.

Try it in your browser, no install needed.

_{Warm near-black background, warm off-white text, and color only where it tells you something.}

Why it exists

I made Umber Calm for my own eyes. I spend long days in terminals and editors, and most dark themes I tried felt loud to me: bright white text on pure black, saturated blues, accents all competing for attention. So I started tuning my own.

I used it every day for months, on different machines and at different hours. Whenever something got in the way, I changed it. When I wasn't sure a color worked, I measured it instead of guessing.

What's left is the palette I want to look at all day. I'm sharing it in case it feels that way to you too.

What makes it different

• Never pure black, never pure white. A warm near-black background keeps the screen gently lit, and warm off-white text stays crisp without glare.
• Measured, not eyeballed. Body text at 10:1, accents between 6:1 and 9.3:1. Every pair is checked automatically on each change.
• Color with a job. Red only means errors and deletions. Amber only marks where you are: the cursor and whatever has focus.
• Calm by design. Hues separate keywords, functions, types and strings while lightness stays in a narrow band, so nothing shouts.

The palette

Every hex value and contrast ratio is in the palette table on GitHub.

Checked for color vision

_{The same code in grayscale and under deuteranopia, protanopia and tritanopia.}

The same calm everywhere

Umber Calm isn't only a VS Code theme. The same palette ships as 59 ports for editors, terminals and tools, so everything you use can match: Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, Zed, Kiro, Ghostty, iTerm2, Kitty, WezTerm, Windows Terminal, tmux, Starship and Obsidian.

See every port on GitHub →

Install

1. Click Install above, or search for "Umber Calm" in the Extensions view.
2. Press Cmd/Ctrl+K Cmd/Ctrl+T and choose Umber Calm.

Using Kiro? Install Umber Calm for Kiro from Open VSX.

If you installed an earlier .vsix from GitHub, uninstall that Umber Calm first: the extension moved to this listing, and both are named Umber Calm.

Feedback

Found a color that gets in the way? Open an issue. Umber Calm is MIT-licensed and maintained in my spare time.