PureBlackOLED - Dark 2026 Default Theme

An OLED-focused Visual Studio Code color theme that changes reviewed static workbench surfaces to pure black (#000000) while preserving the official Dark 2026 syntax, semantic highlighting, foregrounds, borders, accents, and functional state colors.

This is an independent community extension. It is not produced, endorsed, or supported by Microsoft.

What changes

Only reviewed static base surfaces are overridden:

• Editor canvas, gutter, and sticky-scroll surface
• Activity bar, primary and auxiliary side bars, and section headers
• Panel, integrated terminal, status bar, and title bar
• Editor tab strip, tab surfaces, and breadcrumb strip
• Command palette, menus, notifications, and editor popup base surfaces
• Peek view, agent surfaces, and the Dark 2026 generic surface token

Every override is listed in config/background-overrides.json and in the generated machine-readable reports/theme-diff-audit.json.

What stays official

The extension does not redesign syntax highlighting. It keeps the pinned official values for:

• TextMate token rules
• Semantic token rules and semanticHighlighting
• Foreground text and icon colors
• Borders and focus indicators
• Selection, hover, current-line, search, and match backgrounds
• Diff, diagnostic, warning, error, Git, badge, and button state colors

These invariants are enforced by pnpm audit. Packaging fails when an unreviewed color differs from the pinned official theme chain.

Official baseline

VS Code does not provide a supported way for one theme extension to inherit a built-in theme dynamically by theme ID. This project therefore vendors the four official theme files from one immutable commit, verifies their SHA-256 hashes, and includes them locally. The installed extension performs no network requests and has no runtime code.

Install

From a verified VSIX:

code --install-extension .\dist\pureblackoled-dark2026-defaulttheme-1.0.0.vsix

Then select Pure Black OLED - Dark 2026 from Preferences: Color Theme.

The Marketplace installation link will be added after the first public Marketplace release.

Develop and verify

Requirements: Node.js 20 or newer, pnpm, and Visual Studio Code.

pnpm install
pnpm run sync:check
pnpm run validate
pnpm run vsix
node scripts/inspect-vsix.mjs dist/pureblackoled-dark2026-defaulttheme-1.0.0.vsix

Open test/visual.code-workspace to inspect the representative JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, HTML, CSS, JSON, Markdown, and Diff fixtures.

Maintenance

Upstream synchronization is explicit, reviewable, and release-time only. See MAINTENANCE.md before changing the pinned VS Code version or the background allowlist.

License and attribution

Project-authored files are released under the MIT License. Vendored theme files come from the Microsoft VS Code (Code - OSS) repository under the MIT License. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and licenses/vscode-MIT.txt.