RL's Dimmed Themes

A collection of warm, dimmed color themes for Visual Studio Code, packaged as a single installable extension. More dimmed themes will be added over time.

Each theme re-tones the entire UI surface/border palette to a cohesive warm ramp (with the editor as the deepest, most-dimmed surface), while accents, syntax token colors and foreground text are left unchanged. Base theme files are copied from the built-in vscode.theme-defaults extension, together with the base themes they include, so the extension is fully self-contained.

Themes

Include chain

The theme layers on top of the built-in "Modern" / "+" / "Visual Studio" base themes via the include field. All of these files are bundled:

• Dimmed Light 2026: 2026-light.json → light_modern.json → light_plus.json → light_vs.json

Install

From a packaged .vsix

npm install                     # installs @vscode/vsce
npm run package                 # produces rl-vscode-dimmed-<version>.vsix
code --install-extension rl-vscode-dimmed-*.vsix

From source (development)

Open this folder in VS Code and press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host, then pick the theme via Preferences: Color Theme.

Usage

Cmd/Ctrl+K Cmd/Ctrl+T → choose Dimmed Light 2026.

Source & license

The theme JSON files under themes/ originate from the MIT-licensed source code of Visual Studio Code — the microsoft/vscode repository, extensions/theme-defaults — under the MIT License, Copyright (c) 2015 - present Microsoft Corporation.

These files come from the MIT-licensed source, not from the proprietary Microsoft-branded VS Code product binary (whose EULA forbids redistribution). Only the MIT-licensed content is redistributed here.

• Upstream attribution and the full upstream MIT notice: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt
• Our own packaging and modifications: MIT License, Copyright (c) 2026 Ruiqi Lei

Per the MIT terms, the upstream copyright and permission notice are retained for the bundled theme files, and will remain in place as we layer our own modifications on top.