VS Code's Dark+ workbench with Monokai syntax colors.
Dark+ has the better UI chrome — neutral #1e1e1e surfaces, readable sidebar and tabs, well-tuned diff and peek views. Monokai has the better code colors — pink keywords, green declarations, orange parameters, purple literals. This theme is exactly that pairing, and nothing else.
What it does
| Layer | Source |
|---|---|
| Workbench: sidebar, tabs, status bar, panels, terminal, editor background, gutter, cursor | Dark+ |
| Syntax: keywords, types, functions, strings, numbers, comments, markup | Monokai |
Why it's a theme and not settings
The same result can be approximated with editor.tokenColorCustomizations in settings.json, but TextMate scope resolution picks the most specific matching selector, not the last one loaded. Dark+ defines narrow selectors such as storage.modifier that outrank Monokai's broader storage rule, so public and friends stay Dark+ blue no matter what order the customizations are in. Working around that takes ~170 mirrored override rules plus separate semanticTokenColorCustomizations — and it still breaks whenever either upstream theme adds a selector.
Shipping a real theme sidesteps the whole problem: one tokenColors array, no precedence contest.
Semantic highlighting is enabled, but no semanticTokenColors are defined — semantic tokens fall back to TextMate scope mapping, which is what Monokai itself does. Without that, Dark+'s four semantic colors would override the Monokai palette in any language with a semantic token provider.
Install
From the Marketplace: search Dark+ Monokai, or
code --install-extension matheuslopesdev.dark-plus-monokai
Then Cmd+K Cmd+T and pick Dark+ Monokai.
Credits
Derived from two MIT-licensed themes bundled with Visual Studio Code:
theme-defaults(Dark+) — © Microsoft Corporationtheme-monokai— © Microsoft Corporation, based on the Monokai color scheme by Wimer Hazenberg
This extension is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.