QSpad — Neurodivergent Friendly Theme

A minimalist, low-contrast VS Code theme built around the reading comfort tweaks that actually helped: a warm ivory background instead of stark white, one flat text color instead of a rainbow of syntax colors, muted sage-green UI chrome, wide letter spacing, generous line height, no italics, no bracket-pair rainbow colors, and semantic highlighting turned off. The same choices that ease dyslexia (low visual clutter, no color-based cognitive load, no flashing bracket colors) tend to help ADHD, autistic, and other sensory-sensitive readers too.

Minimalism is the point, not a side effect — every choice here favors sensory comfort and a feeling of safety over visual interest. Comments, keywords, strings, and variables are all the same color on purpose. If you want some color distinction back, see "Tuning it further" below.

QSpad theme screenshot

What it changes

Installing this extension sets (as defaults you can still override):

Theme: QSpad (Neurodivergent Friendly) — #FFFDF5 background, #3B3F36 text, muted sage UI chrome, Pantone Withered Rose (#A26666) for deleted/conflict git markers, and a deliberately darker forest green (#1F5C33) for added/inserted markers
Font: Menlo (Consolas on Windows, DejaVu Sans Mono on Linux), no ligatures
Size/spacing: 13px, 22px line height, +0.5 letter spacing
No bracket rainbow colors (editor.bracketPairColorization.enabled: false)
No semantic highlighting (editor.semanticHighlighting.enabled: false) — this is what stops language extensions (e.g. R, Python) from re-coloring functions/keywords on top of the theme

This extension also bundles a second theme, QSpad High Contrast (Neurodivergent Friendly), with the same flat/no-syntax-color approach but noticeably darker text, line numbers, and UI chrome — useful on lower-resolution or lower-quality displays where the softer default can feel too faint. Switch to it via Cmd/Ctrl+K Cmd/Ctrl+T (or Settings → Color Theme) without changing anything else.

Install

From the Marketplace (once published): search "QSpad" in the Extensions panel, or

ext install qingshanneuro.qspad

From source:

git clone https://github.com/QingshanNeuro/qspad.git
cd qspad
npx @vscode/vsce package
code --install-extension qspad-0.1.6.vsix

Tuning it further

Want some syntax color back? Edit themes/qspad-color-theme.json and split the one big tokenColors rule into a few groups (e.g. keep comments/strings distinct, leave functions/variables flat) — this is exactly what we did interactively before flattening it all the way.
Different font? Override editor.fontFamily in your own settings.json — extension defaults never lock you out of changing them.
Different accent? The sage-green UI accents live in themes/qspad-color-theme.json under colors (focusBorder, editor.selectionBackground, editorBracketMatch.border).
On Windows, or a lower-quality display? Consolas at regular weight can read a bit thin — try "editor.fontFamily": "'Cascadia Mono', Consolas, monospace" (bundled with Windows Terminal, or grab it from github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code) paired with "editor.letterSpacing": 0.8. Avoid editor.fontWeight: "bold" to fix thinness — it overshoots into feeling heavy; a font change plus a bit more letter spacing reads more "solid" without that.

Colorblind accessibility

The "added" git indicator (gutter bars, Source Control decorations, inserted-line highlighting) uses a deliberately darker forest green (#1F5C33) rather than a pale sage, so it holds real luminance separation from the Withered Rose used for "deleted" under color-blindness simulation (1.94:1 contrast under deuteranopia, 1.51:1 under protanopia). If you rely on git status colors specifically, VS Code's letter badges (A/M/D/U in the Source Control and Explorer views) are a more reliable, color-independent signal.

Author

Qingshan

License

MIT