Emberstone: Why I built my own dark theme (and what I learned along the way)

🕳️ It all started with a rabbit hole…

One evening, I fell into r/unixporn. You know the kind of community where your terminal looks like a Blade Runner set and every screenshot is a mood board.
I scrolled, I liked, and then I thought: “Why doesn’t my setup feel like that?”

I loved dark themes. But most of them felt too cold, more like a corporate hacker aesthetic than a place I’d want to spend hours in.
I wanted warmth, something cozy yet professional.
That’s how Emberstone was born.

🔥 The idea behind Emberstone

Mood: dark, yes… but inviting.

Goal: readable, balanced contrast, pleasant for long sessions.

Accessibility: good enough to avoid eye strain and UX nightmares.

The name? Emberstone : the glow of embers in the dark.

🛠️ What I wanted to cover

I didn’t want just a VS Code theme. I wanted an ecosystem:
**
✔ Editors:** VS Code (starting point)
✔ Terminals: Konsole, Hyper, Warp, iTerm2 (coming soon)
✔ Browsers: Firefox
✔ Comms: Slack, Discord (coming soon)
✔ Media: Spotify via Spicetify
✔ Websites (Stylus): ChatGPT, Reddit, Twitter, GitHub, YouTube (WIP)

A theme that doesn’t stop at your IDE but extends across your digital environment.

✅ The good and the… real-world stuff

Upsides:
Visual comfort: coding became a smoother experience.
Consistency: no more palette wars between apps.

Challenges:
Time: building a theme is a rabbit hole of its own.
Bugs: spotting broken styles and not having the time to fix them.

📚 What I’ve learned

Theme design is craft: it’s not “just colors.”
Details matter: one wrong color and your UI feels off.

Massive respect to theme maintainers: every theme you install in 3 clicks hides hours of invisible work.

🚀 What’s next?

Emberstone is a side project. It won’t be perfect (especially solo).
But it already taught me a lot: about dev UX, accessibility, and patience.

It’s open source: Emberstone on GitHub.
Try it. Break it. Improve it. Or just steal ideas, whatever works for you will make me happy.