Project notes
A closer look at the design decisions, technical choices, and problems this project was built to solve.
Building a personal VS Code theme
I built Santi020k Theme as a focused pair of editor themes for the tools I use every day. The goal was not only to make VS Code feel more personal, but to turn that design work into a real extension with validation, documentation, release automation, and distribution through the registries developers actually use.
Goals
- Create a calm coding surface with dark and light variants that share the same visual language.
- Keep the theme practical across editor chrome, terminals, panels, syntax scopes, settings, notifications, and Git states.
- Ship it like a product with marketplace metadata, preview assets, validation scripts, tests, and automated publishing.
What I built
- Two coordinated VS Code color themes:
santi020k darkandsanti020k light, tuned around deep indigo surfaces and muted violet accents. - Theme validation scripts that check package readiness, theme structure, registry assets, and contrast-sensitive color pairings.
- A release pipeline for publishing to the Visual Studio Marketplace and Open VSX from versioned releases.
- A small documentation site at theme.santi020k.com with previews, install paths, and development notes.
Results
- Public extension distribution through the VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX.
- Repeatable releases backed by Changesets, package validation, tests, linting, and build checks.
- A stronger personal tooling system where the visual layer, docs, and publishing workflow all live together.
Why it matters
Editor themes look simple from the outside, but good ones touch a surprising amount of product design: hierarchy, contrast, affordance, state, and long-session comfort. This project gave me a compact way to practice those decisions while keeping the same engineering standards I use for larger tools.
