Gruber Darker for Visual Studio Code

A faithful port of the Gruber Darker color theme from Emacs to Visual Studio Code.

Gruber Darker is a darker variant of the Gruber Dark theme for BBEdit by John Gruber. The Emacs version was written by Jason R. Blevins and adapted/extended by Alexey Kutepov (rexim).

About

The theme keeps the original's restrained, layered palette:

Role	Color	Hex
Background	bg	`#181818`
Foreground	fg	`#e4e4ef`
Keyword	yellow	`#ffdd33`
String / Doc	green	`#73c936`
Comment	brown	`#cc8c3c`
Function	niagara	`#96a6c8`
Type / Constant	quartz	`#95a99f`
Number	wisteria	`#9e95c7`
Warning / Error	red	`#f43841`

All colors are taken verbatim from the Emacs theme; the UI chrome uses the theme's own background tiers (#101010 chrome → #181818 editor → #282828 status bar) to mirror Emacs' mode-line / fringe layering.

Install

From Marketplace

Published as XiayongLi.gruber-darker-vsc. Install from the VS Code Marketplace, or from the command line:

code --install-extension XiayongLi.gruber-darker-vsc

From source (local development)

Clone this repository.
Open the folder in VS Code.
Press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host.
Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+K Ctrl+T) and select Gruber Darker.

To package a .vsix for side-loading:

npm install -g @vscode/vsce
vsce package
# Then: code --install-extension gruber-darker-0.2.0.vsix

Tuning

Use the Developer: Inspect Editor Tokens and Scopes command to inspect any token's scope and adjust the matching rule in themes/Gruber Darker-color-theme.json. A few scope mappings (decorators, regex, HTML tags, Markdown) are inferred where Emacs has no direct equivalent.

Credits / License

Git status, editor gutter, and diff / merge editor colors are adapted from VS Code's built-in Dark 2026 default theme (Code - OSS, MIT).
This port is released under the MIT License.

Gruber Darker VSCode

Xiayong Li