VS Code colour themes · light and dark

A blueprint for your editor

Cyanotype is the Nifty Little Tools house style: a blueprint drawn on paper. These two themes bring it to Visual Studio Code.

Cyanotype Light puts navy ink on pale paper with a red accent. Cyanotype Dark is the classic blue sheet with amber and mint. Every colour of text stays readable against its background.

Source code

What it does

Cyanotype Light

Navy ink on blueprint paper: line-blue keywords, green strings, red numbers, a red cursor.

Cyanotype Dark

The blue sheet: sky-blue keywords, mint strings, coral numbers, amber functions and cursor.

The whole window

Editor, side bar, activity bar, tabs, panels, status bar, widgets, inputs and git decorations.

The terminal too

All sixteen ANSI colours, matched to each theme.

Every language

Keywords, types, namespaces, constants, decorators, this and self: checked on samples in 21 languages, with semantic colours to match.

Contrast checked

Every syntax colour and the main text pairs reach WCAG 4.5:1, by its own test.

Install it

Cyanotype is not on the Marketplace yet. Build the package with Node and pnpm from mise, install it, then run Preferences: Color Theme and choose Cyanotype Light or Cyanotype Dark.

mise install
pnpm package
code --install-extension cyanotype-vscode-<version>.vsix

Follow the system

To switch with your system's light or dark mode, turn on window.autoDetectColorScheme and set Cyanotype Light and Cyanotype Dark as the preferred light and dark themes.

Privacy

A colour theme is data: the extension runs no code, makes no network requests and stores nothing. VS Code itself remembers which theme you chose.

This page stores only your light or dark choice, whether you hid the intro, and your answer to the notice, all on this device.