Penumbra Theme

Why does this project exist?

I spend many hours a day in front of the editor and no dark theme ever fully convinced me. Low contrast ones are easy on the eyes but I end up squinting to tell things apart. High contrast ones tend to be aggressive, with oversaturated colors that tire you out after a while. Penumbra tries to balance that: real contrast to clearly distinguish every token, but with a carefully chosen palette that doesn’t fatigue.

One of my favorite colors is wine, and that color is key to this theme. It’s a dark color with a warm hue that I find very pleasant on the eyes.

Creating this theme wasn’t easy, it took me a long time to select each color for every part of VS Code and, for each token. It was a trial and error process, and I always tried to use as few colors as possible to avoid oversaturation.

I couldn’t be happier with the result, the theme is several years old now and I think I’ll keep using it for a long time.