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Building and Publishing the Lemonade VS Code Theme

How to create, publish, and automate a modern VS Code theme using Lemonade as a case study.

Published on May 7, 2025

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🍋 Building and Publishing the Lemonade VS Code Theme

Creating your own Visual Studio Code theme is a rewarding way to personalize your coding experience and share your style with the world. In this article, I'll walk you through how I created the Lemonade theme, how you can build your own, publish it to the VS Code Marketplace, and automate the process with GitHub Actions.

Why Lemonade?

I wanted a modern, vibrant, and readable dark theme inspired by Atom Material, but with a unique color palette and special highlights for tags, quotes, and more. Thus, Lemonade was born!

1. How to Create a VS Code Theme

  1. Set up your project:

    • Create a new folder and initialize with npm init.
    • Add a package.json with the required fields (name, displayName, description, version, publisher, engines, categories, contributes).
    • Create a themes/ folder and add your color theme JSON (e.g., lemonade-color-theme.json).

  2. Define your color palette:

    • Choose a base color (Lemonade uses #2A2D34).
    • Add accent colors for tags, keywords, strings, etc.
    • Map VS Code UI and syntax tokens to your palette.

  3. Test locally:

    • Open the folder in VS Code.
    • Press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host and preview your theme.

2. How to Publish Your Theme

  1. Create a publisher:

  2. Install vsce:

    npm install -g @vscode/vsce

  3. Package your theme:

    vsce package

    This generates a .vsix file.

  4. Publish:

    vsce publish -p <YOUR_PAT>

3. Automate Publishing with GitHub Actions

You can automate publishing on every push to main with a workflow like this:

name: Publish VS Code Extension
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
jobs:
  publish:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: '18'
      - run: npm install
      - run: npx vsce publish -p ${{ secrets.VSCE_PAT }}
        env:
          VSCE_PAT: ${{ secrets.VSCE_PAT }}

Add your VSCE_PAT as a secret in your GitHub repository.

4. Lessons Learned

  • Always test your theme with different languages and file types.
  • Use a .vscodeignore to keep your extension package clean.
  • Add a LICENSE and a good README.

5. Try Lemonade!

You can find the Lemonade theme on GitHub and in the VS Code Marketplace.

Happy theming!

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