Phaze Glow

Phaze-branded dark color theme with an optional text-shadow halo runtime, driven by the phaze.brightness setting.

Theme

Pick it via Command Palette → Color Theme → Phaze Glow.

• Hot pink (#ff00fb) — .phaze fence markers, active tab.
• Bright cyan (#03e6ff) — git-modified, selection, list focus.
• Mint/teal (#09fbd3) — class names, HTML attributes.
• Yellow (#f5d300) — keywords, storage modifiers.
• Neon green (#00ff59) — git-added.
• Coral red (#ff5370) — invalid / errors.
• Editor background #1a1a1a, off-white foreground #eeffff.

Pair with Phaze for .phaze language support so the fence-marker accents have tokens to color.

Halo runtime

Phaze Glow ships with an opt-in workbench patcher that adds a chromatic text-shadow to each accent color, tuned by the phaze.brightness setting. Same pattern as Synthwave '84 / code-glow.

Enable

1. Command Palette → Phaze: Enable Glow.
2. VSCode will prompt to reload — accept.
3. After reload, VSCode may show "Your installation appears corrupt" — this is expected (every workbench-patching extension triggers it). Pick "Don't show again" on that notification.

Adjust brightness

Set phaze.brightness in your settings (range 0.0–1.0, default 0.45). After changing it, re-run Phaze: Enable Glow to bake the new value into the workbench script (brightness isn't hot-reloaded — it's interpolated into the runtime template at enable-time).

// settings.json
{
  "phaze.brightness": 0.65   // brighter halo
}

Skip the per-token glow

Set phaze.disableGlow: true to keep only the editor-chrome glow (cursor, gutter, bracket match) without the syntax text-shadow. Useful if the syntax glow is too noisy at any brightness.

Disable

Command Palette → Phaze: Disable Glow, reload when prompted. This strips the patch from workbench.html and removes the script file from VSCode's install dir.

How the patcher works

Phaze: Enable Glow does three things:

1. Locates VSCode's workbench HTML (handles version drift between electron-browser / electron-sandbox × workbench.html / workbench.esm.html).
2. Writes src/glow/template.js (with phaze.brightness interpolated as an alpha hex byte and src/glow/chrome.css embedded) to a sibling phaze-glow.js in the workbench dir.
3. Adds <script src="phaze-glow.js"></script> to the workbench HTML inside <!-- PHAZE GLOW --> … <!-- /PHAZE GLOW --> marker comments.

At workbench-load time, that script runs a MutationObserver for the .vscode-tokens-styles element, finds each color: #XXXXXX; rule that matches a Phaze Glow palette color, and rewrites it to include text-shadow at the configured brightness.

Trade-offs

The same trade-offs every workbench-patching extension carries:

• VSCode auto-updates clobber the patch — re-run Phaze: Enable Glow after each VSCode update.
• Needs write access to VSCode's install dir. Fine for per-user installs on macOS; system installs may require relaunching VSCode with admin privileges.
• The "installation corrupt" banner appears once and is dismissable.

Install

code --install-extension madenowhere.phaze-glow

Or search "Phaze Glow" by publisher madenowhere in the Extensions view.

Files