42 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
42 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Alien Blood VS Code theme"
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slug: /alien-blood-vscode-theme/
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date: 2022-01-01
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tags: ["project", "productivity"]
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---
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I'm endlessly toggling through colour themes in VS Code, combining them with
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different fonts and icons to approximate a Platonic ideal of the optimal working
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environment. I am never satisfied. There is always some aspect that displeases
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me.
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Over the last month or so I decided to resolve the issue once and for all by
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creating my own custom theme.
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I have always really enjoyed the Alien Blood colours that are one of the default
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themes of the iTerm2 terminal emulator for Mac. I decided I would use this as my
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base and try to construct a full syntax and UI scheme from the terminal
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pallette. This wasn't easy because the colour palettes of terminal themes are
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more austere than those designed for syntax-highlighting. It took lots of
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tweaking to try and make the resulting theme visually harmonious but not so
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homogenous that you cannot distinguish the syntax at glance.
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I was able to achieve this without introducing any additional colours to the
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default Alien Blood palette. The theme can be demoed in the browser
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[here](https://vscode.dev/theme/ThomasBishop.alien-blood/Alien%20Blood%20) and
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downloaded from the
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[extension marketplace](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ThomasBishop.alien-blood).
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You can also view the theme on
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[GitHub](https://github.com/thomasabishop/alien-blood-vscode).
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I'm particularly happy with the rendering of TypeScript and Angular components
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which is what I am editing the majority of the time at work, similarly with HTML
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and CSS. However I think there is room for improvement when it comes to plain
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JavaScript and other filetypes such as shell scripts. In these cases the
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highlighting is too homogenous and dark but now I have the basic palette
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completed I can add additional rules for specific programming languages in
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future releases.
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