vscode VS sublime-scheme-alabaster

source: https://github.com/rose-pine/vscode

I use Alabaster[1]. Contrary to most themes, it is quite minimalistic and it emphasises comments instead of de-emphasising them. I like the minimalism, because it lets me focus, instead of marking every single thing on the screen as a different colour of “important” making my head spin.

[1]: <https://github.com/tonsky/sublime-scheme-alabaster>

I have been tinkering away at my personal take on what a modern, monochrome-esque Emacs might look for some years now and it is finally in a place where I think other might find it useful. The approached draws wisdom from the realization that "highlighting everything is the same as highlighting nothing" and tries to remedy the de-facto practice of theme by way of fruit-salad with more considerate approach. Inspired by alabaster's use of backgrounds for subtle syntax highlighting, typographic ideals and my endlessly sore eyes, it leaves text a comfortable black/white while drawing attention to constants, comments, declarations, and strings. A customizeable highlight color (by default a golden beige) provides a bit of life to the otherwise monochrome palette.

While I don't fully disable syntax highlighting, I use a minimal theme [0,1] that only has highlighting for comments, strings and globals. It reduces eye strain, and I never find myself relying on highlighting to navigate through code. LSPs provide an "outline" which can be very useful to navigate through code. I find "jump to symbol" function in my text editor to be faster than scanning all of the code to find the line.

Also most themes dim the comments, but IMO if something in the code needed an explanation, it should be brighter, not dimmer.

[0]: https://github.com/tonsky/sublime-scheme-alabaster

[1]: https://github.com/gargakshit/vscode-theme-alabaster-dark