Reliquary

A VS Code color theme built around one idea: syntax highlighting reads better with several accents live on screen at once.

A luxurious assortment of jewel tones, amethyst, sapphire, emerald, teal, and ruby, glows against a rich graphite and ink background, with warm gold marking every place your eye should land.

Reliquary Light carries the same richness onto a warm parchment surface, trading ink and graphite for cream and soft neutrals without losing any of the color.

Screenshots / Preview

Markdown

Python

TSX

Why Reliquary exists

Most dark themes on the Marketplace pick a single accent color, one blue or one purple, and lean on it everywhere. Reliquary gives keywords, function calls, strings, types, and errors each their own jewel tone: amethyst, sapphire, emerald, teal, ruby. A file's structure is visible at a glance instead of blurring into one color. Gold/brass is the one color reserved for interaction: selection, cursor, the active-tab underline, the status bar. It stays a clear signal instead of competing with the syntax colors.

Reliquary shares its palette with the matching terminal prompt and Windows Terminal colour scheme, so a shell opened inside VS Code's integrated terminal and an external terminal window read as the same visual world.

What's included

• Reliquary is the dark theme: black/graphite chrome, cream text, jewel-tone syntax and terminal colors.
• Reliquary Light is a light variant of the same palette. Each jewel tone reuses its dark-mode hex as its light-mode text color rather than inventing new ones, so the two themes stay related. The integrated terminal panel stays dark in both themes: most people run a dark terminal regardless of editor theme, and Reliquary Light doesn't force one on you.

Install

From the Marketplace: search for "Reliquary" in VS Code's Extensions view, or install directly from the Marketplace listing.

From source:

Prerequisites: VS Code 1.70 or later, and Node.js installed (only needed for the npx packaging step below; the theme itself has no runtime dependencies).

git clone https://github.com/Freehold-Foundry/reliquary-vscode-theme.git
cd reliquary-vscode-theme
npx --yes @vscode/vsce package --allow-missing-repository
code --install-extension reliquary-theme-0.4.0.vsix

Copying this folder straight into .vscode/extensions will not register it. VS Code's extension picker reads from its own extensions.json manifest, and only the real install pipeline above writes to that file.

Then reload the window (Developer: Reload Window from the Command Palette, or just restart VS Code), open the Command Palette again, and run Preferences: Color Theme → choose Reliquary or Reliquary Light.

Palette

All hex values trace back to the Freehold Foundry's shared Master Palette. Every "bright" value below is what shows up in the dark theme's syntax tokens and terminal; the muted/dark value backs UI chrome and darker surfaces.

The same palette drives the 16-color integrated-terminal palette and bracket-pair colorization (amethyst → sapphire → emerald → gold), which is where "several jewel tones visible at once" shows up hardest in ordinary code.

Structure

reliquary-vscode-theme/
  package.json                        extension manifest, registers both themes
  icon.png                            Marketplace listing icon
  themes/
    reliquary-color-theme.json        dark theme: color + syntax token definitions
    reliquary-light-color-theme.json  light theme: same structure, light-mode values
  examples/                           demo source files used for the screenshots above
  screenshots/                        theme screenshots embedded in this README
  .github/badges/                     self-hosted README badges (PNG, with SVG sources kept alongside)
  LICENSE                             Apache 2.0, modified by the Commons Clause
  README.md

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. This is a small, self-contained extension, so most changes are a matter of editing the two theme JSON files under themes/ and repackaging with vsce package.

License

Free and source-available — not OSI-approved open source. Licensed under Apache 2.0, modified by the Commons Clause: you can read, use, and modify this theme freely; the Commons Clause condition restricts reselling the software itself. See LICENSE for the full text.

Reliquary is the first Freehold Foundry Project, a free and source-available initiative.