Dancheong

Color themes drawn from dancheong (단청) — the mineral pigment palette Korean artisans have painted on temple and palace woodwork for 1,500 years.
Deep indigo beams, cinnabar red, ochre gold, verdigris green — tuned for code.

Four variants

Theme	Mood	Body text contrast
Dancheong Night	The flagship dark — indigo beams at dusk	12.7 : 1
Dancheong Dawn	Light — warm hanji paper, ink, and pigment	9.6 : 1
Dancheong Storm	High contrast dark — every accent ≥ 7.5 : 1	14.6 : 1
Dancheong Mist	Muted dark — desaturated, for long sessions	8.5 : 1

Night

Dancheong Night

Dawn

Dancheong Dawn

Storm

Dancheong Storm

Mist

Dancheong Mist

Why another theme?

Most themes are tuned by eye. Dancheong is tuned by a build pipeline: every text color is checked against every background it ships on — editor, sidebar, inputs, terminal, even the selection highlight — 222 pairs per build — and the build fails if any pair misses its gate: 7:1 body text; 4.5:1 for UI text, comments, and syntax accents; 3:1 for text on selection, ANSI colors, and diagnostics. Two documented exemptions: decorative ink (whitespace markers, indent guides) is intentionally quiet, and the light variant keeps ANSI white light per terminal convention. The palette is one JSON file; every port is generated from it, so all apps match exactly.

Colors aren't decoration here. Contrast is why your eyes last through a six-hour session.

Install

VS Code: search Dancheong in the Extensions panel, or ext install dancheong.dancheong-theme — then ⌘K ⌘T and pick a variant. (Marketplace page)

Cursor / Windsurf / VSCodium: same — search Dancheong in Extensions. These editors install from Open VSX, where Dancheong is also published.

iTerm2 / Alacritty: free ports live in extras/ — import the .itermcolors file, or drop the .toml into your Alacritty config.

Dancheong PRO

The full pigment set, for every tool you stare at:

13 apps today: VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, Sublime Text, Obsidian, iTerm2, Alacritty, Kitty, Ghostty, Windows Terminal, Warp, tmux, Zed — more rolling out to the same palette
All four variants everywhere, byte-identical colors
Lifetime updates — new apps and variants included

Get Dancheong PRO on Gumroad →

The five colors

Obangsaek (오방색) — the five cardinal colors of Korean cosmology — anchor the palette: blue (east), red (south), yellow (center), white (west), black (north). Dancheong pigments were ground from minerals, which is why they read muted yet vivid: real rocks, not neon. This theme keeps that quality — saturated enough to separate tokens, calm enough to live in.

License

MIT — the free themes in this repo are yours to use and modify.

Dancheong — Korean Traditional Palette

Dancheong Theme