vanesse

Vanessë is a bold dark colour theme for Visual Studio Code, with a matching file icon theme. Gold, violet and cyan sit on a deep violet night sky, a lemon cursor and magenta edges mark where you are, and every file in the explorer gets its logo on a soft cloud badge.

Install

Search for Vanessë in the Extensions view, or from a terminal:

code --install-extension davidkoen.vanesse

Then, from the Command Palette:

• Preferences: Color Theme, and choose Vanessë
• Preferences: File Icon Theme, and choose Vanessë Icons

The two are independent, so either works on its own. The same package is published to Open VSX for VSCodium and other compatible editors.

The palette

Surfaces run from #06050F at the window frame to #0D1026 behind the code, with a plum #1C1045 status bar.

Weight carries structure as well as colour. Control flow such as if and return, class names, constants and tags are bold. Storage words such as class and async, parameters, attributes, decorators and comments are italic.

File icons

Vanessë Icons has 82 icons mapped across about 190 file names, extensions and folder names: languages, frameworks, build tools, config and data formats, and repository files such as lockfiles, .env and .github. Each is a logo on a soft cloud badge, coloured from the theme's palette rather than each brand's own colours, so the explorer reads as one piece.

VS Code draws file icons at 16px, so the logo fills most of the badge and the cloud sits behind it. See ADR 0007.

Recommended settings

A theme can only set colours and icons. These optional settings suit it:

{
  "editor.cursorStyle": "block",
  "editor.cursorBlinking": "phase",
  "editor.fontLigatures": true,
  "editor.fontFamily": "'Monaspace Argon', Consolas, monospace"
}

Monaspace is a free monospaced type family from GitHub, under the SIL Open Font License. Install it on your system first. VS Code does not download fonts.

Accessibility

Every syntax colour clears WCAG AA, 4.5:1, against the editor background and the current-line highlight, and at least 3:1 inside a selection. Interface text, focus rings, diagnostics and terminal colours are held to the same floors on every surface they sit on, including the plum status bar.

These are not guidelines. pnpm test measures them and CI fails if a change breaks one. The numbers are in ADR 0003.

Line numbers and ignored files are the deliberate exception, held to 3:1 so the gutter stays quiet.

Privacy and security

Vanessë is theme data and nothing else. It declares no entry point, so VS Code never runs code from it. It requests no permissions, makes no network requests and collects no telemetry. The published package holds only the two theme files, the icon SVGs and the docs, and CI fails if anything else would ship. See SECURITY.md.

Stack

There are no runtime dependencies, and nothing in devDependencies ships. See docs/adr/ for why each was chosen.

Getting started

pnpm install
pnpm build

Open the folder in VS Code and press F5. An Extension Development Host opens with both themes loaded. Pick them with Preferences: Color Theme and Preferences: File Icon Theme.

Run pnpm run build:watch alongside it to regenerate on every save, then run Developer: Reload Window in the host to see the change.

Scripts

Project structure

src/
├── palette.ts          Raw colours. The only hex values in the repo
├── roles.ts            What each colour means: surface, text, accent, syntax, signal, icon
├── color.ts            WCAG contrast, alpha and mixing
├── theme/
│   ├── workbench.ts    Interface colours
│   ├── tokens.ts       TextMate scope rules
│   ├── semantic.ts     Semantic token colours
│   ├── theme.ts        Assembles the three into one colour theme
│   └── types.ts        The VS Code theme format
└── icons/
    ├── badge.ts        Renders a glyph onto the cloud badge
    ├── glyphs.ts       The logo and colours behind every icon
    ├── generic.ts      Original drawings where no logo exists
    └── icon-theme.ts   File, extension and folder name mappings
scripts/
├── build.ts            Writes both themes and every icon SVG
└── check-package.ts    Package allowlist guard
themes/                 Generated, gitignored
docs/
├── adr/                Architecture decision records
└── architecture.md     How the pieces fit

Tests sit beside the file they test, as <name>.test.ts.

Hex values live in src/palette.ts and nowhere else. The emitters in src/theme/ and src/icons/ read roles, never the palette. Both rules are enforced by tests.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for branch naming, commit format and the pre-PR checklist.

Continuous integration

Every pull request into main runs .github/workflows/ci.yml:

Publishing

Releases are cut by tag and published by .github/workflows/release.yml. Bump version in package.json and add a matching CHANGELOG.md entry in a pull request. Once it is merged:

git checkout main
git pull
git tag v0.2.0
git push origin v0.2.0

Open VSX receives it through an OVSX_PAT token stored on the release environment, so only a v tag release you approve can use it. Open VSX does not support trusted publishing yet. It skips versions that already exist, so a failed release is re-run from the Actions tab.

The VS Code Marketplace gets the same file by hand. Download the .vsix from the GitHub release, then on the publisher's Manage page choose New extension for the first release, or Update on the extension after that. Microsoft only issues Marketplace publishing tokens through an Azure DevOps organisation linked to an Azure subscription, so the upload takes the place of a stored token. See ADR 0006.

Logos and trademarks

The file icons use logos from Simple Icons, released under CC0, recoloured to match the theme. Java, C# and PowerShell use original drawings, because their owners asked Simple Icons to remove them. All product names and logos are trademarks of their respective owners, used here only to identify file types. Vanessë is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them. See ADR 0005.

Known issues

pnpm 11 refuses to run until build scripts are decided. pnpm-workspace.yaml allows @vscode/vsce-sign, which fetches its signing binary, and declines keytar, a native keychain module only vsce login needs. This project does not use vsce login.

vsce is held on 3.x. 4.0.0 was published on 2026-09-14 and falls inside pnpm's minimum release age, which exists to keep freshly published, possibly compromised versions out. Move to 4.x once it has aged, rather than adding an exclusion.

vsce runs with --no-dependencies. The theme has no runtime dependencies, so dependency detection, which shells out to npm, is switched off.

The identifier is vanesse. npm names, GitHub repositories and Marketplace IDs reject the diaeresis, so only the display name carries it.

Line-drawn logos are the faintest icons. PostgreSQL, MySQL, Laravel, XML and .NET are drawn in thin strokes, so they are rendered without the sticker outline and still read lighter than the rest at 16px.

A Simple Icons upgrade can withdraw a logo. Simple Icons removes a logo when its owner asks. glyphs.ts imports each logo by name, so an upgrade that drops one fails the type check rather than shipping a blank icon. The icon then moves to generic.ts.