Auric Artisan Theme

Twenty-four themes, and an engine to make the twenty-fifth yours.
The auricartisan.com design system, ported to VS Code in full.

Install and pick a theme

1. Install Auric Artisan Theme from the Marketplace.
2. Press Ctrl+K then Ctrl+T (⌘+K ⌘+T on macOS).
3. Type Auric and choose one of the twenty-four.

That is the whole setup. Everything below is optional.

Prefer a menu? Auric Theme: Switch Variant… in the Command Palette lists them with their canvas and polarity. Ctrl+Alt+' cycles.

One accent, the whole workbench

The accent is a key, not a coat of paint. Every wash, border, selection, focus ring and cursor is derived from it — rotated in OKLCH at fixed lightness and chroma, so a sapphire lands with the same weight the gold had instead of turning to mud.

That is also how the twenty-four shipped variants are built: one family of neutrals, one accent, everything else derived.

The variants

Thirteen dark

Eleven light

How to customise it

Open the Studio with Ctrl+Alt+;, or click the paintcan in the status bar, or run Auric Theme: Open Theme Studio.

Nothing you do here needs a reload. Every change is written as a theme-scoped override and applies instantly.

1 · Start from a look

Eleven named starting points. A look is a layer, not a reset — it sets a batch of dials, and anything you change afterwards still wins.

Gallery turns everything up for a projector. Nocturne deepens the canvas and quiets the comments. Foundry goes monochrome. Clarity pushes contrast to AAA.

2 · Turn the dials

Thirty-seven of them, grouped: surface depth, warmth and separation · border weight · text contrast · comment emphasis · syntax palette, saturation, italics and bold · cursor · selection strength · current line · bracket pairs · indent guides · whitespace · inlay hints · sticky scroll · tab style · every bar · the ANSI palette · shadows · focus ring.

A gold dot marks anything you have changed, with a one-click revert beside it.

3 · Or go straight to the colours

All 107 slots the theme is built from — surfaces, the foreground ramp, lines, accent, states, selection, semantics, the ANSI set, git decorations and all 26 syntax roles. Search, expand a group, pick a colour. A hand-picked value beats every dial above it.

4 · Check it is still readable

Eighty-one contrast pairs, live, with WCAG ratios and APCA Lc. Failures sort to the top.

5 · Keep it, or share it

Save a named preset, copy your customisation to the clipboard as JSON, paste someone else's, or export a standalone *-color-theme.json.

Exports store your dials and overrides, not resolved colours — so a theme you share today picks up engine fixes shipped tomorrow.

The sidebar

For the things you want without opening a panel:

• Variants, grouped by family, each with a live five-colour preview strip.
• Accent as a swatch grid — one click re-keys the whole workbench.
• Look picker.
• Contrast — the worst pair in your current theme and whether it passes. Click it to open the Audit tab.
• Open Theme Studio, Reset, Export.

It holds its layout down to 200px, so it works in a narrow side panel.

Settings

Every dial is a real setting under auricTheme.*, so a team can commit a house style to .vscode/settings.json and everyone gets the same editor.

{
  // Re-key the theme onto any hue. `inherit` keeps the variant's own accent.
  "auricTheme.accent.preset": "patina",
  "auricTheme.accent.custom": "#5CC9B4",
  "auricTheme.accent.intensity": 120,

  // Syntax
  "auricTheme.syntax.palette": "cool",     // jewel · vivid · pastel · mono · bullion
                                           // classic · warm · cool · duotone
  "auricTheme.syntax.italics": "off",
  "auricTheme.syntax.saturation": 90,

  // Surfaces
  "auricTheme.surface.depth": -1,
  "auricTheme.surface.warmth": 20,
  "auricTheme.surface.separation": "layered",

  // Guard rails
  "auricTheme.a11y.enforceContrast": true,
  "auricTheme.a11y.minContrast": 4.5       // 4.5 = AA, 7 = AAA
}

Commands

Accessibility is enforced, not claimed

Every colour the engine emits passes a contrast guard before it reaches your editor. Anything below your minimum is pushed along its OKLCH lightness axis until it clears, keeping hue and chroma intact.

The guard runs after your hand-picked colours, not before. A colour you chose is a strong preference; it is not a licence to make comments invisible.

The build audits 81 pairs per theme — 1,944 in total: editor text, all 26 syntax roles, the 14 text-bearing ANSI colours, git decorations, and the text and borders of every dropdown, input, checkbox, radio, button, badge, menu and quick pick. Form-control borders are held to WCAG 1.4.11's 3:1 against the fill they enclose, and that is checked rather than asserted. A missing colour is a failure, not a skip.

Turn the guard off if you want the freedom. The audit still reports.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• On parchment the published #D3AF37 measures 2.9:1 — it is a tint, not text. The light variants derive a working gold instead, and keep the brand chip for washes and hairlines.
• fg.faint — disabled controls, ghost text, the watermark — is deliberately not guarded. WCAG exempts disabled controls, and forcing it up would make ghost text compete with real code.

How it works

There is no supported way to register a colour theme at runtime, so customisation writes theme-scoped overrides into three settings:

workbench.colorCustomizations            → ["obsidian-gold"] { … }
editor.tokenColorCustomizations          → ["obsidian-gold"] { textMateRules: […] }
editor.semanticTokenColorCustomizations  → ["obsidian-gold"] { enabled: true, rules: {…} }

They apply instantly, apply only while an Auric theme is active, and disappear cleanly when removed. Blocks belonging to other themes, and your own unscoped customisations, are never touched.

With every dial at its default the engine reproduces each shipped theme byte-for-byte — and the build fails if it doesn't. An untouched install writes nothing to your settings.json.

Building

The theme files are generated. Editing themes/*-color-theme.json directly will be overwritten.

npm run build     regenerate themes/ and package.json, fail on any error
npm run check     validate only
npm run report    the full contrast table, per variant, with APCA
npm test          the engine suite plus the shipping gate
npm run preview   render both webviews and screenshot them
npm run assets    regenerate the README art
npm run logo      redraw the brand mark

lib/ is the engine — OKLCH colour maths, the palette, the 107-slot schema, the 37 dials, the composer, the workbench and token maps, the audit. build/ is tooling and never ships. Zero runtime dependencies, no bundler, no network.

_{© 2026 Auric Artisan · Licence: see LICENSE.txt in the extension · auricartisan.com}