Zacess Themes

Four high contrast code themes that match the Zacess reader, so a student sees the same page in the reader and in the editor. Every text and syntax colour keeps at least 7:1 contrast (WCAG AAA) on the background, the selection and the current line, comments included.

Theme	For	Text on background
Zacess Light	Everyday use in a bright room	`#111111` on `#ffffff`
Zacess Dark	Everyday use in a dim room	`#f5f5f5` on `#121212`
Zacess Yellow on Black	Low vision	`#ffeb3b` on `#000000`
Zacess Cream	Dyslexia friendly reading	`#000000` on `#fdf6e3`

Zacess Light: TypeScript, Python, Rust and HTML lines in dark colours on white, with keywords in bold and comments in italics

Zacess Dark: the same code in light colours on near black

Zacess Yellow on Black: the same code in yellow, white and pale colours on black

Zacess Cream: the same code in dark colours on a cream background

Colour is never the only signal

Keywords, control flow and markup tags are bold.
Comments and parameters are italic.
Invalid code is underlined.
Tokens that often sit side by side differ in lightness or font style, not only in hue. Strings and numbers, added and removed lines and other red and green pairs are checked under simulated protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia.

Install

Search for Zacess Themes in the Extensions view (Cmd+Shift+X on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+X elsewhere) and select Install. It is on the VS Code Marketplace and, for Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium, Antigravity, Kiro and other editors built on VS Code, on Open VSX.
Run Preferences: Color Theme (Cmd+K Cmd+T on macOS, Ctrl+K Ctrl+T elsewhere) and pick a Zacess theme.

From a terminal the first step is:

code --install-extension zacess.zacess-themes

To install offline, download zacess-themes-<version>.vsix from the latest release and run Extensions: Install from VSIX....

The contrast tables, the palette and the same themes for JetBrains IDEs, Obsidian, Neovim, Zed and terminals are in the zacesshq/themes repository.

Licence

MIT.

Zacess Themes

Zacess

Zacess Themes

Colour is never the only signal

Install

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Licence