Violeeter

A violet theme for everything.

Dark and light, for your editor and your terminal. Every colour that can carry text is verified against WCAG AA: measured, not guessed.

grippado.github.io/violeeter →

The shared visual system, logo usage and typography are documented in docs/BRAND_IDENTITY.md. The logo wordmark uses Akaya Telivigala; the theme itself uses system sans and monospace fonts for readability.

---

Install

Grab one file from dist/, or clone and take what you need:

git clone https://github.com/grippado/violeeter
cd violeeter/dist

Where	File	How
VS Code	Marketplace	install grippado.violeeter, or build the .vsix from dist/vscode-extension/
Neovim	violeeter-{dark,light}.nvim.lua	drop in ~/.config/nvim/colors/violeeter-dark.lua, then :colorscheme violeeter-dark
Zed	violeeter-{dark,light}.zed.json	copy into ~/.config/zed/themes/
iTerm2	violeeter-{dark,light}.itermcolors	double-click, then Settings → Profiles → Colors → Presets
Alacritty	violeeter-{dark,light}.toml	import it from alacritty.toml
Kitty	violeeter-{dark,light}.conf	include violeeter-dark.conf in kitty.conf
Ghostty	violeeter-{dark,light}.ghostty	paste into your config
WezTerm	violeeter-{dark,light}.wezterm.toml	drop in ~/.config/wezterm/colors/
Windows Terminal	violeeter-{dark,light}.json	add to schemes in settings.json
Slack	violeeter-{dark,light}.slack.txt	Preferences → Appearance → Custom theme → Import theme, paste one line
Obsidian	violeeter.obsidian.css	copy into vault/.obsidian/snippets/, then Settings → Appearance → CSS snippets
Web	violeeter.css	custom properties, light and dark
Tailwind	violeeter.tailwind.js	merge into tailwind.config.js

The VS Code entry is a whole publishable extension — manifest, both themes, icon and readme — generated into dist/vscode-extension/ by the same build. Its package.json takes the version, name, description and banner colour from violeeter.json, so there is no second place for any of them to drift, and its themes/ are byte-identical to the .vscode.json exports beside them.

The Neovim colorscheme sets highlight groups directly (no plugin manager, no dependency, treesitter groups included) and sets terminal_color_* so :terminal matches the buffer beside it.

The palette

	Background	Worst text contrast	WCAG AA
Violeeter Dark	#24203F	4.53	pass
Violeeter Light	#FAF8FE	4.84	pass

The dark variant is built from one base. Two things follow from a violet ground rather than a black one, and neither is optional: blue has to move, because the default terminal blue sits a few degrees away and the two stop separating; and neutral grey reads yellow against a cold ground, so the foreground carries a trace of the same hue instead of being a true grey.

The light variant is not the dark one flipped. Inverting lightness gives colours that are correct in theory and pastels on white in practice. Each one was re-picked at a luminance that reads on a pale ground, with the hue kept.

Contrast is checked, not claimed

python3 build.py --check

Measures all thirty-six values against their own background and exits non-zero if any colour that can carry text drops under 4.5:1.

Nothing is exempt, and two colours were changed to keep it that way.

white and brightWhite in the light variant used to be exempt, on the reasoning that they mean "the palest thing here" and so are surfaces. That is right about the name and wrong about the use: colour 7 is the default foreground of a large share of terminal programs. Under btop they measured 1.61:1 and the memory labels were not dim, they were absent.

brightBlack measured 2.07 in the terminal this palette grew up in, and that slot is where nearly every syntax highlighter puts comments. Shipping it meant shipping unreadable comments.

The checker also walks the ui block now. It used to stop at the ANSI slots, so gutter, which is the line number column and therefore text, shipped at 2.91 while the summary said PASS. A checker that measures the colours you remembered to list measures your memory.

Porting it somewhere else

Nothing in dist/ is written by hand. A port is a function that takes the palette and returns a string:

def my_editor(v, syntax):
    return f"background = {v['background']}"

Add it to EXPORTS (or EDITOR_EXPORTS, which also receives the syntax mapping), run python3 build.py, open a pull request.

Both registries write one file per variant. When the target wants both variants in the same file — because it switches at runtime, like a browser or Obsidian — the port takes the whole dataset instead and main() calls it directly. That is what css(), tailwind() and obsidian() are.

violeeter.json is the only file anyone edits. Two things live in it:

• the palette, per variant
• syntax, the mapping from semantic role to palette slot: comment → brightBlack, string → green, keyword → magenta

That mapping is why a string is the same green in VS Code, Neovim and Zed. A port that re-picks colours locally is how a theme ends up subtly different in every editor, and it is the one thing a pull request here will be asked to change.

Publishing the VS Code extension

python3 build.py writes the package; publishing only uploads it. Bump version in violeeter.json and rebuild — the manifest follows, and there is no second version to remember.

Open VSX (VSCodium, Cursor, Windsurf, Gitpod). The token comes from open-vsx.org → Log in with GitHub → Settings → Access Tokens, and the namespace has to match publisher in the generated manifest:

python3 build.py
cd dist/vscode-extension
npx ovsx create-namespace grippado -p "$OVSX_PAT"   # once, ever
npx ovsx publish -p "$OVSX_PAT"

The Visual Studio Marketplace, which needs an Azure DevOps organisation and a personal access token scoped to Marketplace → Manage, issued for all accessible organisations:

cd dist/vscode-extension
npx @vscode/vsce publish -p "$VSCE_PAT"

npx @vscode/vsce package writes a .vsix without publishing anything, which is also how you install the theme on a machine without either registry: code --install-extension violeeter-<version>.vsix.

Licence

MIT. Take it, port it, change it.

It is the palette Violeet ships with.