Yamlink Theme Family

The official VS Code theme family for Yamlink — built for linked-note workflows, wikilinks, frontmatter-heavy Markdown, and structured knowledge work. A serious dark and light theme for everyday development too.

Variants

Yamlink Night

The flagship dark variant. Sharp, deep, and focused — vivid semantic accents on a neutral-warm dark substrate. Built for long focus sessions.

Yamlink Night

Yamlink Ghost

"Content fades. Connections remain." An ultra-dark skin where prose and general syntax recede to near-gray. Only [[wikilinks]] emerge as the single unambiguous bright signal. The tonal system whispers semantic structure rather than announcing it.

Yamlink Ghost

Yamlink Dawn

The light variant with editorial discipline. Neutral cool grays instead of the usual pastel wash. Ink weight over softness — built for clarity.

Yamlink Dawn

Font used in screenshots: JetBrains Mono

Built for Yamlink

These themes are the official visual environment for Yamlink — the VS Code linked-note extension built around wikilinks, structured frontmatter, and knowledge-graph workflows.

Yamlink surfaces that every theme variant is explicitly designed around:

Yamlink surface	What the theme does
`[[wikilinks]]` and backlinks	Treated as first-class elements — distinct color, not plain punctuation
Frontmatter keys (`id:`, `type:`, `date:`, `tags:`)	Each key field gets a dedicated semantic color tied to its role
`!view` query blocks	Visually separated from prose — amber logic hue, bold weight
Note identity fields (`id:`)	Styled to communicate permanence — lavender identity hue
`#tags`	Chip-style decoration with background fill and tonal color
Date fields and `@shortcuts`	Orange/tonal hue — distinct from strings and identifiers

The theme family was designed in parallel with Yamlink's feature development. Token color decisions are not incidental — they are tied to how Yamlink actually reads, parses, and decorates your notes.

These themes make the most of what Yamlink does. If you write in Yamlink, this is the visual system built around it.

The themes also hold up for TypeScript, Python, Rust, Go, JSON, YAML, CSS, Markdown, diff, and terminal work. Yamlink integration is additive, not a constraint.

Color System

The family shares a fixed semantic hue grammar. Each hue has a locked meaning across all three variants — only lightness and saturation shift between Night, Ghost, and Dawn.

Hue	Semantic role	Night	Dawn
Mint	Connection — wikilinks, strings, backlinks, linked entities	`#C5FFBF`	`#007A65`
Pink	Structure — YAML/frontmatter keys, schema markers, metadata labels	`#FF429F`	`#C41961`
Lavender	Identity — types, classes, functions, note IDs, declarations	`#C49BF0`	`#5A3F99`
Amber	Logic — keywords, `!view` blocks, control flow, query execution	`#E7A85A`	`#75470C`

Ghost — Tonal Palette

Ghost does not use saturated hues. Instead, every semantic role gets a tonal blend: 20% Night source hue + 80% body gray #7a7a7a. The result is a palette that whispers structure rather than announcing it.

Role	Token	Color
Wikilinks / backlinks	`yamlink.link`	`#f5f7fa` (near-white — the single bright signal)
Frontmatter / YAML keys	`yamlink.schema.key`	`#956F81` (Pink tonal)
Identity / types / functions	`yamlink.id`	`#898192` (Lavender tonal)
Keywords / `!view` blocks	`yamlink.view.block`	`#908374` (Amber tonal)
CSS props / inline code / tags	`yamlink.tag`	`#748B88` (Teal tonal)
Date fields	`yamlink.date`	`#957B74` (Orange tonal)
Body text / prose	—	`#7a7a7a`