Tidepool

A calm, cool dark theme for VS Code — greens, teals, and blues from a single palette, built with red-green color blindness in mind. It ships in two depths, so you can pick the contrast that suits your screen:

• Tidepool — a soft mid-gray background (#333333)
• Tidepool Deep — a darker background (#2F2F2F) with more separation between surfaces

Both share the same syntax colors, and the editor and integrated terminal draw from one palette so the two surfaces read as a single environment.

Install & activate

Search Tidepool Color Theme in the Extensions view (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+X) and click Install — or from the command line:

code --install-extension s3mi0tics.tidepool

Then pick a depth any time: Cmd/Ctrl+K Cmd/Ctrl+T → Tidepool or Tidepool Deep.

Syntax at a glance

A deliberately restrained mapping — a blue family for structure, a green family for data:

• Keywords — teal
• Functions — soft blue
• Types — bright cyan
• Strings & numbers — green
• Properties — green
• Variables — bright green
• Comments — gray

Warm tones stay out of your code: red and amber are reserved for errors and warnings, and the git colors live only in the gutter and diffs.

Accessibility

Tidepool is designed around red-green color blindness. Syntax meaning rests on brightness and the blue–yellow axis rather than a red-versus-green difference, and the core token colors clear WCAG 2.1 AA contrast against the editor background. Errors use a warm orange instead of pure red, so they stay visible to red-weak vision.

Palette

The full 16-color ANSI set powers the integrated terminal.

License

MIT © 2026 Colby Kauk

Designed and built with the help of Claude.