🌘 Leftish

A VS Code color theme with minimal highlighting inspired by Left. Dark version coming soon.

Motivation

Most VS Code themes look like fireworks making it hard to discern any meaning from the colors. This one aims to be easy on the eyes and reserves colors for meaningful things.
Emphasize: comments, selections, matches, definitions (what you search for and what you communicate about)
De-emphasize: control flow statements (if, else, loops, etc) — those are usually the most obvious and least interesting parts of the program.

Leftish is heavily inspired by Left, Alabaster and brutalist-theme.

Screenshot of a VS Code editor with the Leftish color theme active

How can I use it?

In VS Code, go to View → Extensions
Search for "Leftish" and click "Install"
After it’s installed, click "Set Color Theme"

Recommendations

For a calmer editing experience, I recommend the following settings:

Hide the activity bar: View → Appearance → Activity Bar Position → Hidden
Hide the sidebar: ⌘ B or Ctrl B
Use the Commands Palette instead: ⇧ ⌘ P or ⇧ Ctrl P
Hide the bottom Output Panel: Drag from the top frame of the panel down until it disappears
Disable icons, rainbow parens, indentation guides, breadcrumbs, lightbulbs sigh, and line numbers (use Ctrl G instead) by adding this to your User Settings JSON file (⇧ ⌘ P → Open User Settings (JSON)):

"workbench.editor.showIcons": false,
"workbench.layoutControl.enabled": false,
"workbench.iconTheme": null,
"editor.bracketPairColorization.enabled": false,
"editor.guides.indentation": false,
"editor.lightbulb.enabled": "off",
"editor.lineNumbers": "off",
"editor.renderWhitespace": "selection",
"calva.highlight.enableBracketColors": false,
"calva.highlight.rainbowIndentGuides": false,
"calva.highlight.highlightActiveIndent": false,
"breadcrumbs.enabled": false,

Disclaimer

I’m mostly using Clojure/LISP in my day-to-day work so the theme might be heavily biased towards this. I also checked it against various JS, TS, HTML and CSS files but you might run into cases where things look weird … which brings us to the next section.

But it doesn’t support…

Feel free to open a PR with whatever you need. If it fits the theme, I’ll probably merge it.

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Leftish