Theme Mixer

A VS Code extension that assigns any installed color theme to each UI section independently, applied live on top of your base theme.

Status: design + implementation plan complete; extension not yet built. See docs/.

What it does

Your normal active theme stays your base. The mixer writes only per-section overrides on top of it (into workbench.colorCustomizations and editor.tokenColorCustomizations), so you can, for example, run a dark UI with a light editor by setting just the Editor section to a light theme.

Sections

• Editor (background, syntax, gutter, breadcrumb, minimap)
• Tabs + Editor Header
• Activity Bar + Sidebar + Title Bar
• Panel + Terminal
• Status Bar
• Popups + Widgets

Commands (planned)

• Theme Mixer: Set Section Theme / Set Editor Theme / Set Chrome Theme
• Theme Mixer: Clear Section / Clear All / Reapply

Known limitation (important and honest)

Some VS Code color keys are shared across surfaces. editor.background paints both the code editor and the Extensions/Settings/Welcome pages; foreground/descriptionForeground are global text colors. No override can split one key into two values, so a light Editor section will still leave those auxiliary pages low-contrast. The mixer adds flexibility (mix any installed themes per section, live), not new granularity that VS Code itself lacks. Webview editors (markdown WYSIWYG/preview) ignore VS Code colors entirely and must be configured in their own extensions.

Docs

• docs/spec.md - design and constraints
• docs/implementation-plan.md - phased TDD build plan (Task 6 = runnable POC)
• docs/release-plan.md - versioning, distribution, rollback