EINK 60HZ Theme

A VS Code dark theme based on Dark High Contrast, enhanced with font-style differentiation for grayscale/e-ink readability — with colors specifically fine-tuned for high contrast on e-ink.

⚠️ Warning: the colors are tuned for e-ink, so they are desaturated and washed out on a normal monitor. If you mainly work on a regular monitor, this theme will look bad — use a different theme instead.

Screenshots

The Problem

E-ink monitors are grayscale. Traditional syntax highlighting relies entirely on color to distinguish code elements. On a grayscale display, colors collapse into near-identical gray levels, making code hard to scan.

Most e-ink setups use ICC color inversion (black ↔ white) for readability, but this doesn't solve the fundamental problem: color is the only dimension of differentiation.

The Solution: Font Style as a Semantic Dimension

This theme layers font styles on top of the standard Dark High Contrast colors:

On a normal monitor, these styles reinforce the color signal. On a grayscale e-ink, they become the primary signal — each code element has a unique typographic identity regardless of shade.

Why Not Just Grayscale?

The theme keeps the Dark High Contrast color palette as its base, but the colors are desaturated and fine-tuned for maximum contrast on e-ink — not for color monitors. Expect them to look dull, washed out, and muddy on a regular screen.

• E-ink, with or without inversion — font styles as primary signal, colors tuned for high contrast here

Semantic Token Coverage

The theme includes semanticTokenColors rules so TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, and other language-server-backed languages get the same font-style treatment at the semantic level — covering types like class, interface, enum, function, method, parameter, and modifiers like *.declaration, *.static, *.readonly, *.deprecated.

Implementation Note: uiTheme

The dark variant (themes/eink_60hz_dark.json) declares "uiTheme": "hc-black" and the light variant (themes/eink_60hz_light.json) declares "uiTheme": "hc-light" — not "vs-dark". This tells VS Code to use the built-in high-contrast UI base for all chrome (status bar, activity bar, sidebar, tabs, panels, menus, etc.). The theme file itself only defines editor-area colors (background, selection, etc.) — everything else is inherited from the high-contrast base.

Light Variant

themes/eink_60hz_light.json is the exact color inversion of the dark theme (every RGB channel flipped, alpha preserved), generated by local/invert_theme.py. This is deliberate:

• On e-ink, the grayscale rendering is identical to the dark theme — same luminance levels, just inverted — so readability is unchanged and you can pick whichever polarity suits your room lighting
• The same font-style differentiation applies everywhere

Regenerate it after tuning the dark theme:

python3 local/invert_theme.py themes/eink_60hz_dark.json themes/eink_60hz_light.json "Eink 60Hz (Light)"

Design Principles

1. Hierarchy over decoration — every font style maps to a semantic category; nothing is arbitrarily bold or italic
2. Pure black or pure white background — the dark variant uses #000000, the light variant #ffffff; maximum contrast either way
3. Minimal font-style combinations — only 5 styles (bold, italic, bold+italic, strikethrough, underline) to avoid confusion
4. Consistency across languages — broad TextMate scope lists ensure Python, JS/TS, Java, C++, CSS, and others all benefit

Standalone TextMate Rules

Don't want the full theme? The font-style rules are also available standalone in text-mate-rules/eink_60hz_text.json — paste them into editor.tokenColorCustomizations in your settings.json to get the font-style treatment on any theme:

{
  "editor.tokenColorCustomizations": {
    "textMateRules": [
      {
        ...
      }
    ]
  }
}

The full rule set in text-mate-rules/eink_60hz_text.json is larger — copy its editor.tokenColorCustomizations block into your settings.json as-is.

Or merge them automatically (backs up settings.json to .bak first):

python3 local/merge_config.py text-mate-rules/eink_60hz_text.json

Requires json5 and deepmerge: pip install json5 deepmerge

Usage

1. Install the extension from VS Code Marketplace
2. Select Eink 60Hz (Dark) or Eink 60Hz (Light) from the theme picker (Preferences: Color Theme)
3. Works immediately on both e-ink and grayscale monitors; pick the polarity that suits your room lighting

On a normal monitor? The desaturated colors make this theme unpleasant to use. Stick to Dark+, Dark High Contrast, or any other standard theme for day-to-day work on a regular screen.

Based on the original Dark+ Contrast theme by k3a.