Alien Blood Contrast

A dark VS Code color theme that combines the deep green UI atmosphere of Alien Blood with the proven syntax highlighting palette of Solarized Dark.

Themes

This extension ships ten themes from one package — two contrast levels, each available neutral or with one of four status bar accents.

Standard is the original balance: Alien Blood UI, Solarized Dark syntax.

High contrast keeps every Alien Blood hue and every background surface untouched — it only raises the brightness of text, icons, borders and line numbers. Syntax moves to brighter Solarized values. Every syntax color clears WCAG AA against the editor background; the weakest is 6.15:1, versus 3.42:1 in the standard variant.

The accent variants are byte-identical to their neutral counterpart apart from the statusBar* keys. See Telling windows apart.

Concept

• UI & Backgrounds — The dark green tones, sidebar, activity bar, tabs, terminal, and status bar colors come from Alien Blood
• Syntax Highlighting — All code coloring (keywords, strings, comments, variables, etc.) uses the classic Solarized Dark palette

This gives you the distinctive Alien Blood look and feel while keeping the highly readable and well-balanced Solarized syntax colors.

Installation

1. Open Extensions in VS Code (Cmd+Shift+X / Ctrl+Shift+X)
2. Search for Alien Blood Contrast
3. Click Install
4. Open Color Theme picker (Cmd+K Cmd+T / Ctrl+K Ctrl+T)
5. Pick any of the ten Alien Blood Contrast entries

Telling windows apart

If you keep several VS Code windows open, give each project its own status bar color. The status bar suits this better than the title bar: a thinner strip, always visible, and no collision with the window controls.

Pick the accent variant in the project's .vscode/settings.json — one line, no color values to maintain:

{ "workbench.colorTheme": "Alien Blood Contrast High Blue" }

Available accent themes:

Orange is the one carrying dark text; a light foreground would drop to 2.69:1 on it.

Each accent theme also pins statusBar.debuggingBackground, so the bar keeps the project's color while you debug instead of turning orange — which matters most when several debug sessions run side by side. statusBarItem.remoteBackground is pinned too, so the Remote/WSL indicator does not break the strip with its own green block.

Any other color

If you need an accent outside those four, override the status bar per project instead. This works with any of the ten themes:

{
  "workbench.colorCustomizations": {
    "[Alien Blood Contrast High]": {
      "statusBar.background": "#7f2b27",
      "statusBar.foreground": "#f2f8f5",
      "statusBar.border": "#7f2b27",
      "statusBar.debuggingBackground": "#7f2b27",
      "statusBar.debuggingForeground": "#f2f8f5",
      "statusBar.noFolderBackground": "#7f2b27"
    }
  }
}

The theme name in square brackets keeps the override from leaking into other themes.

Building

themes/alien-blood-contrast.json is the single source. Every other theme file, the contributes.themes list in package.json, and the preview page are generated:

npm run build

Edit the base theme, run the script, and everything stays in sync. Hand edits to the generated files are lost on the next run.

Preview page

docs/index.html renders every variant side by side — editor sample, status bar, and the WCAG contrast ratio of each syntax color against its own background. It reads the theme JSON directly and resolves scopes the way VS Code does, so it is a check on the actual shipped values rather than a mockup. Open the file in a browser, or serve docs/ via GitHub Pages.

Rerun npm run build-preview after changing the base theme, otherwise the page shows stale colors.

Releasing

Publishing runs from GitHub Actions. Tag a version and the workflow builds, checks and uploads it:

npm version 0.4.0 --no-git-tag-version
git commit -am "Bump to v0.4.0"
git tag v0.4.0
git push && git push --tags

The workflow refuses to publish if the tag does not match package.json, or if npm run build changes any file — that catches a hand-edited generated theme before it reaches the Marketplace, where a version can never be replaced, only superseded.

One-time setup: add a repository secret named VSCE_PAT under Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions. It is an Azure DevOps personal access token for the publisher account, scoped to Marketplace → Manage.

To rehearse without publishing, run the workflow manually from the Actions tab with dry run enabled — it builds and runs every check but uploads nothing.

Credits

This theme is a combination of two excellent themes:

• Alien Blood by Thomas Bishop — UI colors
• Solarized Dark by Ethan Schoonover — Syntax highlighting (built into VS Code)

License

MIT