Ember Black

An OLED-first VS Code theme built on true black with warm, Claude-inspired accents.

Three themes

All three share one syntax palette — the saturated token colors are byte-for-byte identical across them. Ink and Slate differ from Black in exactly two ways: how far off black the canvas sits, and a cool blue-grey cast on the greys. Both keep Ember Black's own contrast ratios rather than eyeballed ones, so a lifted canvas costs no crispness.

OLED-first, not OLED-only. True black was designed for panels that switch pixels off, but it holds up on LED-backlit LCDs too — the palette's contrast ratios are the same either way. If it reads too stark on yours, Ink and Slate are the same syntax colors on a lifted canvas.

The same C# file in each:

Ember Black

Ember Ink

Ember Slate

Design

• True-black editor (#000000) — designed for OLED displays
• Warm accent — #d97757 orange on focus borders, buttons, cursor, text links, active tab top border, and function parentheses
• Saturated syntax palette — a distinct mid-tone hue per token category (purple keywords, blue tags, terracotta strings, gold functions, sky variables, green numbers, teal types) for fast visual sorting
• Layered chrome — Ember Black lifts its sidebar, status bar, tabs, and title bar above the editor with near-black greys (#0a0a0a, #0d0d0d). Ink and Slate drop the same chrome below the editor instead, so the eye settles on the code rather than on a frame around it

Install

Install from the VS Code Marketplace, or from inside VS Code — open Quick Open (Ctrl+P) and run:

ext install malinfossum.ember-black

Then open the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) → Preferences: Color Theme → pick Ember Black, Ember Ink, or Ember Slate.

From a VSIX

1. Download the latest ember-black-<version>.vsix from Releases
2. In VS Code, open the Extensions view
3. Click the ⋯ menu in the top-right → Install from VSIX...
4. Select the downloaded file

Recommended setting

Add this to your settings.json so the theme's own bracket colors apply:

"editor.bracketPairColorization.enabled": false

VS Code's built-in colorizer tints brackets by nesting depth. Ember Black colors them by kind instead — () orange, {} teal, [] gold — so the shape of a nested structure reads at a glance. Turning the built-in one off hands that job to the theme.

Leave it on if you prefer depth colors. The theme styles those too, in editorBracketHighlight.foreground1–6.

Language coverage

Tuned scope-by-scope for JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS/SCSS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, YAML, Shell, SQL, TOML, Dockerfile, Markdown, and diffs — plus the HTML-derivative single-file components: Vue, Svelte, Astro, JSX/TSX.

Sample files for each of those live in preview/.

Everything else falls back rather than falling through. The theme colors the root TextMate scopes — punctuation, entity.name, entity.other, constant, storage, support — and lets the specific rules override them, so a language the theme has never heard of still gets a full palette instead of plain white. Language servers land in the same place: VS Code resolves an unmapped semantic token through the extension's own scope map, which points back at those roots.

The exception is a server that ships no scope map for a token type. Those are mapped by hand in semanticTokenColors — Pylance's brackets and modules, and the Roslyn C# set.

Development

Ember Black is the source of truth. Ink and Slate are generated from it:

npm run build

Edit themes/ember-black-color-theme.json, re-run the build, and commit all three theme files. Never hand-edit themes/ember-ink-color-theme.json or themes/ember-slate-color-theme.json — they are overwritten.

Each variant is two numbers in tools/build-variants.mjs: a canvas level and a channel tint. Everything else is derived — every grey is re-found on the new canvas at the same contrast ratio it held against black, and the dim tokens are scaled in linear-light space so they keep their calibrated dimness.

icon.png is artwork, not a build output. Nothing in the build touches it.

License

MIT