A high-fidelity VS Code port of the beloved Primary theme for Obsidian (Classic Original palette) by Cecilia May.
Primary's aesthetic is warm, muted, and cozy — inspired by aging magazines, where "the luxurious green was now minty, the blues were subdued, the reds were cozy." This port pulls the exact color values straight from the Obsidian theme's source _classic-original.scss so the look matches what you see in Obsidian as closely as a code editor allows.
Ships two variants:
- Primary Dark — warm dark-brown backgrounds (
#2e261f), soft sepia text - Primary Light — warm off-white / cream backgrounds (
#f8f5f1), deep cocoa text
Primary is a Markdown-note theme, so it doesn't define programming-language tokens directly — it has a semantic palette (red / orange / yellow / green / blue / purple) and a philosophy: italics feel blue, bold feels red, links feel yellow. This port maps that philosophy onto code:
| Token | Color |
|---|---|
| Comments | muted warm gray |
| Strings | green |
| Keywords / storage | red |
| Functions | blue |
| Types / classes | yellow |
| Constants / numbers | orange |
| Variables | normal text |
| Operators / punctuation | softened gray |
Download primary-theme-vscode-<version>.vsix from the
Releases page, then:
code --install-extension primary-theme-vscode-1.0.0.vsixgit clone https://github.com/deadblue22/primary-theme-vscode.git
ln -s "$(pwd)/primary-theme-vscode" ~/.vscode/extensions/primary-theme-vscodeThen restart VS Code and pick Primary Dark or Primary Light via
Cmd/Ctrl+K Cmd/Ctrl+T (Preferences: Color Theme).
- Original Obsidian theme: Primary by Cecilia May — https://github.com/primary-theme/obsidian
- All color values derive from that project, which is licensed GPL-3.0.
- This port is therefore distributed under GPL-3.0-or-later to stay compatible. See
LICENSE.
This is a community port and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the original author.