Pax Code

A beautiful dark theme and keyboard shortcuts reference panel for VS Code

✨ Features

🎨 Dark Themes

Pax Code comes with two carefully crafted dark themes:

• Night Theme - A comfortable dark theme with balanced contrast
• Night Theme Vivid - A more vibrant version with enhanced colors

Both themes feature:

• Semantic highlighting support
• Optimized syntax colors for multiple languages
• Easy on the eyes for long coding sessions

⌨️ Hotkeys Reference Panel

Pax Code adds a Hotkeys panel to your Activity Bar for quick shortcut reference.

• 📁 Grouped by Category – Font/Zoom, Editor Tabs, Explorer, Terminal, Selection/Editing
• 🔍 Quick Reference – View shortcuts at a glance
• ⚡ Auto-load – Loaded automatically on VS Code start
• 👤 Profile-aware – Hotkeys are isolated per VS Code Profile
• ⚠️ Validation & Warnings – Invalid entries are detected and warned
• 🚨 Duplicate Highlighting – Conflicting shortcuts are highlighted in red

🧠 Smart Hotkey Validation

When importing a hotkeys.json file, Pax Code performs automatic checks.

✅ Schema Validation

• Required fields:
  • group
  • label
  • key
  • command
• Optional field:
  • when
• Invalid or missing fields trigger warnings (non-blocking)
• Data is still loaded to avoid interrupting workflow

🚨 Duplicate Shortcut Detection (key + when)

• Shortcuts are considered duplicates only if both key and when match
• Empty or missing when is treated as global
• Duplicate entries:
  • Trigger a warning during import
  • Are highlighted with a red error icon
  • Display a DUPLICATE label and tooltip in the Hotkeys panel

📦 Installation

From VS Code Marketplace

1. Open VS Code
2. Go to Extensions (Cmd+Shift+X / Ctrl+Shift+X)
3. Search for "Pax Code"
4. Click Install

From VSIX File

code --install-extension pax-code-x.x.x.vsix

🚀 Usage

Activating the Theme

1. Open Command Palette (Cmd+Shift+P / Ctrl+Shift+P)
2. Type "Color Theme"
3. Select Preferences: Color Theme
4. Choose Night Theme or Night Theme Vivid

Using Hotkeys Panel

1. Click on the Hotkeys icon in the Activity Bar (left sidebar)
2. Expand categories to see available shortcuts

⚙️ Configuration

Custom Hotkeys

Pax Code does not require editing extension files directly. Instead, you can import your own hotkeys configuration safely.

1️⃣ Use the Sample Hotkeys File (Recommended)

Start with the official sample file provided by Pax Code: hotkeys.json

You can download this file and modify it to fit your workflow.

2️⃣ Hotkeys JSON Format

Each hotkey entry supports the following structure:

{
  "group": "Category Name",
  "label": "Action Description",
  "key": "cmd+shift+p",
  "command": "workbench.action.showCommands",
  "when": "editorTextFocus"
}

🛠️ Development

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20+
• Yarn or npm

Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/sanglq/pax-code.git
cd pax-code

# Install dependencies
yarn install

# Compile
yarn compile

# Watch mode
yarn watch

Building VSIX

# Package the extension
yarn package
npx vsce package

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some amazing feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
5. Open a Pull Request

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Made with ❤️ by sanglq