Isolum

A near-black VS Code color theme built on smart saturation — strong color only where it matters for fast reading.

Inspired by Dark+ and Ayu.

Design

Isolum has one rule behind every color decision: saturation is a budget. Strong color goes only where it speeds up reading — types, strings, function calls, control keywords — and everything else stays deliberately neutral so it never competes for attention.

Two consequences you'll notice immediately:

No italic, no bold. Anywhere. Every semantic distinction is made with color alone, including comments and Markdown emphasis.
The editor is the darkest surface in the theme, not the lightest. Chrome sits just above it. That inverts the usual dark-mode elevation convention on purpose — you stare at the editor all session and only glance at the chrome.

The surface ramp is a dark graphite: cool enough to have a personality, but neutral enough that large backgrounds don't compete with the blue keyword signal for the same hue.

Tier	Role	Hex
content	editor, terminal, gutter, minimap	`#0f1113`
chrome	sidebar, panel, status bar, tabs	`#111315`
elevated	widgets, hover, suggest, menus	`#1a1c20`

Floating surfaces are separated by their tier and a 1px border — every shadow token is fully transparent.

Full rationale, the signal hierarchy, per-language rules and the mechanical validation method are in docs/SPEC.md. It is the source-of-truth: any color change has to be justified against it first.

Install

From the Marketplace, search for Isolum. Or from a local .vsix:

code --install-extension isolum-vscode-theme-1.1.1.vsix

Then: Ctrl+Shift+P → Preferences: Color Theme → Isolum.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Author

plajiw