KonexForge Themes

Charcoal-forged surfaces. Molten orange accents. Code that feels premium.

A family of 4 VSCode color themes built around a "forge" aesthetic: hot orange, amber, and copper accents — like metal cooling from an anvil — carried consistently across a dark, a light, and two high-contrast variants. Designed to be distinct, striking, and easy on the eyes during long sessions.

What it looks like

These previews are generated from the theme files themselves (node scripts/render-preview.js), resolving each token through the same scope lookup VSCode uses — so they can't drift from the actual themes.

The warm accents carry the "action" parts of code — keywords, tags, storage, function and method names — plus, in copper, the parts that name a place rather than hold a value. The literals are cool, so an ordinary line of code doesn't turn into a wall of orange:

So <div class="row"> reads orange tag → steel-blue attribute name → slate-teal value, const n = 42 reads orange keyword → plain text → steel-blue number, and padding: 12px reads copper property → steel-blue number → copper unit.

Between comments and body text sits a four-step neutral ramp — doc comments, punctuation, operators and parameters each get their own weight, in all four variants — so structure stays readable without pulling colour into it.

The theme family

All four share the same "hot metal" hue language (orange/amber/copper accents, steel-blue/slate-teal/violet cool counterpoints) re-derived per variant for contrast, so they read as one recognizable family everywhere you use them.

Features

• Four variants sharing one hue language — Dark, Light, Dark High Contrast, Light High Contrast — installed together from a single extension.
• A "hot metal" accent system (orange / amber / copper) as the visual hero, balanced by cool counterpoint hues (steel blue, slate teal, violet, green) held a step lower in chroma so they support the heroes instead of competing with them.
• Full workbench theming: activity bar, status bar, tabs, terminal (16-color ANSI palette), git decorations, diff editor, notebooks, debug console, three-way merge editor, testing and coverage, notifications, and more.
• Semantic highlighting support for richer accuracy in TypeScript, Python, Rust, Go, C#, and other LSP-backed languages.
• Syntax tuned per language rather than left to generic fallbacks: CSS/SCSS selectors, units and colour literals; Java/Kotlin annotations; Markdown lists, fences and separators; Rust lifetimes; YAML, diff, shell and SQL.
• Deliberate, sparing use of italics in Dark/Light — reserved for the "annotation layer" that describes other code: comments, keywords, parameters, decorators, and markup attribute names. Storage, functions, types, strings, and plain variables stay upright for fast scanning. Both High Contrast variants drop italics entirely for maximum legibility.
• Every syntax color meets WCAG AA (4.5:1) against its background in Dark/Light and AAA (7:1) in both High Contrast variants — enforced automatically on every commit, not just eyeballed. The same suite guarantees the four variants keep identical roles, not just identical keys, so no variant quietly flattens a distinction the others make — and measures the warm/cool balance of the palette itself, so the theme can't drift away from being a warm theme one rule at a time.

Installation

From the Marketplace: Search for KonexForge Themes in the Extensions view, or run:

ext install konexforge.konexforge-themes

Installing the extension gives you all four theme variants.

From a VSIX file:

code --install-extension konexforge-themes-1.1.0.vsix

Activating the theme

Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) → Preferences: Color Theme → choose one of KonexForge Dark / KonexForge Light / KonexForge Dark High Contrast / KonexForge Light High Contrast.

Customization

Each variant is built from a small set of role colors if you want to tweak things via workbench.colorCustomizations. The Dark theme's full role palette:

The two warm accents are the loudest colors on screen on purpose: orange and amber carry the code's skeleton and its actions, and the four cool accents sit a step lower in chroma so they read as support rather than competing for attention. Roughly half of all colored syntax scopes are warm — the validator enforces that balance, because the palette had drifted cool once before without anyone noticing.

Light and both High Contrast variants re-derive lightness per variant from these same hue identities — deeper on the warm parchment background of Light, brighter or deeper still in the High Contrast pair — so all four read as one family. Don't copy Dark's hexes into Light: they won't meet contrast there.

Recommended settings

Since comments and keywords render in italic on Dark/Light, a monospace font with a distinct italic style (e.g. one with ligature support) pairs especially well with those two variants. (Both High Contrast variants don't use italics, by design, for maximum legibility.)

Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome — especially feedback on contrast, language coverage, or palette tweaks.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

License

MIT