Warm Burnout

The theme for developers who are already burned out but still have deadlines.

Built on one premise: your eyes have been bullied enough by radioactive blue themes. Warm Burnout is a mostly warm syntax palette with one cool steel-blue accent for types and WCAG-audited contrast. Two variants: Dark for the 3am sessions and Light for when someone forces you to open the blinds.

The Problem With Your Current Theme

Most themes look great in screenshots. Then you use them for 14 hours straight and your eyes feel like they've been sandpapered.

The blues, cyans, and purples that make themes look "cool" also turn code into a neon aquarium after twelve hours of work and pretending it is fine.

Warm Burnout pushes almost every syntax role into warm materials: amber, terra cotta, sage, brass, coral, and old stone. Types keep one cool accent because otherwise warm themes turn into mud.

Contrast Audit

Not taste. Math.

Dark: Every Token AAA

Every syntax color meets WCAG AAA (>= 7:1 contrast ratio) against the editor background. Most themes can't even get comments past 4:1.

Your comments are readable at 3am. On purpose.

Light: AA Minimum, Sepia Cream Background

The light theme uses #F5EDE0, a warm sepia cream, not white. It is 14.6% less bright than pure white by relative luminance. Still bright enough to read code, less like staring into a dentist lamp.

All 15 syntax tokens pass AA. No exceptions.

How It Works

Background: no pure black, no pure white

The dark background (#1a1510) is a warm brown-black. Pure black (#000000) can make text bloom or bleed for some users, especially with astigmatism. The warm brown-black steps back from pure black.

The light background (#F5EDE0) is warm sepia cream. No pure white anywhere.

Three-tier font style system

Color alone gets worse under fatigue and color vision differences. When warm tones blur together, shape still has to carry meaning.

• Bold: structural keywords (if, return, const). Your eye scans these for code flow.
• Italic: types and comments. The single cool accent (steel-blue/teal) plus italic makes types easier to pick out.
• Normal: everything else.

A developer running on no sleep can rely on more than color. Luxury.

One cool accent: oxidized copper

The palette is mostly warm, not fully warm. Types/classes use #90aec0 (dark) / #285464 (light), the color of oxidized copper. One cool accent keeps the warm palette from turning into mud.

Cursor: gold, not red

The accent color is copper rust (#b8522e) for buttons and badges. The cursor uses warm gold: #f5c56e dark, #8a6600 light. A copper cursor gets confused with error indicators. Gold is visible everywhere.

The Palette

Inspired by materials that age well. Unlike your eyes.

Languages Tested

TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, JSX, CSS, SCSS, Python, Rust, Go, Java, YAML, JSON, Markdown, Diff.

Semantic highlighting enabled for languages that support it.

Installation

Search "Warm Burnout" in the Extensions panel, or:

ext install felip3fdl.warm-burnout

Then select Warm Burnout Dark or Warm Burnout Light with Cmd+K Cmd+T (or Ctrl+K Ctrl+T).

Also Available For

• Zed
• JetBrains (IntelliJ, WebStorm, RustRover, etc.)
• Neovim
• Xcode
• Ghostty
• iTerm2
• Windows Terminal
• tmux
• Starship
• Zsh (syntax highlighting + fzf)
• eza

License

MIT. Use it, fork it, burn it out.