Matcha

A warm green theme for people who look at an editor all day, in two strengths: Koicha (濃茶, thick tea) is dark, Usucha (薄茶, thin tea) is light.

What it is like to read

The palette is authored in OKLCH and every role stands on a fixed lightness step, so contrast comes from lightness rather than saturation and nothing in the theme glows. Body text holds 12:1, comments 5.7:1, and the whole range stays narrow enough that the eye never jumps between brightness levels. No color ships until it clears its threshold — 4.5:1 for text, 3:1 for supporting and decorative roles — measured by both WCAG 2.1 and APCA.

Green roles carry visible chroma while neutrals stay near zero. A neutral with mid chroma on a warm hue washes out into cream and the whole theme starts reading as yellow, which is the failure mode most green themes fall into.

There are exactly two warm notes, both deliberate and local: ochre on numbers, terracotta on errors. The only cold colors left are ANSI blue and cyan, which terminal programs depend on.

Both variants are authored, not derived. Deriving the light one from the dark by contrast distance pushed every role to where sRGB holds almost no chroma, and the result read as a green monochrome.

Install

Open the Extensions view, search for Matcha, install. Then Cmd+K Cmd+T (Ctrl+K Ctrl+T on Windows and Linux) and pick Matcha Koicha or Matcha Usucha.

To follow the system appearance, set both:

{
  "window.autoDetectColorScheme": true,
  "workbench.preferredDarkColorTheme": "Matcha Koicha",
  "workbench.preferredLightColorTheme": "Matcha Usucha"
}

Elsewhere

The same palette is generated for Ghostty, Obsidian and Claude Code, so a terminal beside the editor matches it rather than approximates it. Source, issues and the other themes: github.com/vnva/matcha.

License

MIT