Gruber Darker

A native Visual Studio dark theme with muted UI chrome and a warm, readable syntax palette — ported from the Gruber Darker lineage that runs through Emacs and BBEdit.

Screenshots

C# — syntax highlighting for classes, members, and comments in the editor

XAML — markup, attributes, and data bindings rendered with the theme

About

Gruber Darker for Visual Studio brings a long-running color scheme lineage natively into the VS shell — editor, tool windows, and chrome alike — rather than just recoloring the text editor.

The lineage:

1. Gruber Dark — the original BBEdit colour scheme by John Gruber.
2. Gruber Darker — a darker Emacs port of Gruber Dark, originally by Jason Blevins and now maintained by Alexey Kutepov (rexim).
3. This extension — a Visual Studio port of the Gruber Darker palette, mapped across the full set of VS editor, language service, and environment colour tokens (not just the code editor).

The palette itself (bg, fg, red, green, yellow, brown, niagara, wisteria, …) is carried over unchanged from gruber-darker-theme.el; what this project adds is the mapping of those roles onto Visual Studio's much larger token surface.

Features

• Full-shell theming: editor surface, language service classifications, tool windows, and environment chrome all resolve to the same Gruber Darker palette, not just syntax colours.
• Warm, low-saturation syntax highlighting: comments in brown, strings in green, keywords in yellow, types in a muted quartz grey.
• Consistent diagnostic colouring for errors, warnings, added/removed/changed state, and debugger execution markers.

Installation

From the Visual Studio Marketplace

1. Open Extensions → Manage Extensions in Visual Studio.
2. Search for Gruber Darker.
3. Select Download, then restart Visual Studio to complete installation.

From a .vsix file

1. Download the latest .vsix from the Releases page, or build it locally (see CONTRIBUTING.md).
2. Double-click the .vsix file and follow the installer prompts.

Usage

1. In Visual Studio, open Tools → Options → Environment → General.
2. Set Color theme to Gruber Darker.
3. Select OK.

Requirements

• Visual Studio 2022 (installation target range [17.0, 18.0)) with the Visual Studio core editor component.
• .NET Framework 4.7.2 or later.

Contributing

The theme is generated from a token-mapping pipeline rather than hand-written XML. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the pipeline, how to regenerate the theme, and how to build and debug the extension locally.

License

Released under the MIT License.

Credits

• Gruber Dark for BBEdit — original colour scheme by John Gruber.
• Gruber Darker for Emacs — Emacs port originally by Jason Blevins, maintained by Alexey Kutepov (rexim).