[Guide] Omarchy Themes - VS Code extension override

[cfulton]

Omarchy Themes - VS Code extension override

Each theme in Omarchy is stored in the themes/ directory. Within each theme, there is a vscode.config file that specifies the extension and theme names for Omarchy to use when applying a theme to VS Code (code, code-insiders, codium, and cursor).

After installing Omarchy, those themes are located in the system at ~/.local/share/omarchy/themes/. Users looking to make changes to their themes should not update from this .local directory, as those changes are likely to be lost during updates. Instead, users should create their theme overrides in their .config directory for themes ~/.config/omarchy/themes/.

Omarchy theme selection works by calling omarchy-theme-set, which does the following in order:

1. Copies the .local version of the theme ~/.local/share/omarchy/themes/<theme>/ to ~/.config/omarchy/current/theme/

2. Copies the .config version of the theme ~/.config/omarchy/themes/<theme>/ to ~/.config/omarchy/current/theme/. This overrides any of the .local files for the current theme with the .config files.

3. Handles updating the current theme for applications.

Knowing this, we can update the VS Code theme extension used by Omarchy Themes on our system.

How to create a VS Code theme override

The current Everforest theme uses the VS Code theme extension sainnhe.everforest, that extension is deprecated causing warning about the deprecated extension.

I will use this as an example of how to change the theme's extension in VS Code to reesew.everforest-theme. If you are making changes that are not for the Everforest theme VS Code extension, then you will need to change some of the commands.

1. Clone the current Everforest theme vscode.config

mkdir -p ~/.config/omarchy/themes/everforest

cp ~/.local/share/omarchy/themes/everforest/vscode.json ~/.config/omarchy/themes/everforest/vscode.json

2. Edit the newly created ~/.config/omarchy/themes/everforest/vscode.json
   It will look like this:

{
  "name": "Everforest Dark",
  "extension": "sainnhe.everforest"
}

Update it so it looks like this:

{
  "name": "Everforest Dark",
  "extension": "reesew.everforest-theme"
}

3. DONE! If you were already on Everforest, you can run omarchy-theme-refresh in the terminal, or next time you change Omarchy's theme to Everforest, it will refresh the VS Code theme to the new extension theme.

Note: Don't forget to remove the previous no longer needed extension from VS Code.

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Alternatively, if you are game to update the repo and fix the issue, see PR #5498.

[DoubyCz]

Thanks for the guide @cfulton — really useful pattern.

One edge case worth flagging: the override approach assumes there's an alternative extension on Open VSX to point to. For some Omarchy-shipped themes that's not true. Concrete example — the Ethereal theme uses Bjarne.ethereal-omarchy, which is published to VS Code Marketplace only:

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://open-vsx.org/api/Bjarne/ethereal-omarchy
404

Same applies (I suspect) to other Bjarne.*-omarchy themes (Hackerman, Snow, Aura, Pulsar, Sakura, Medusa, Soho, Evergreen, Elysian, Firesky, Lupine — Bjarne publishes nothing to OVSX at all).

For those themes there's no OVSX alternative to swap to via your override pattern, so VSCodium users have only two options:

1. Manually grab the .vsix from VS Code Marketplace and codium --install-extension <file.vsix> — works but bypasses Omarchy's auto theme sync.
2. Live with the default fallback theme in Codium when those themes are active.

Long-term I think the cleanest fix is for theme authors to dual-publish to Open VSX (free via ovsx publish, takes ~1 line in CI). Filed bjarneo/ethereal-vscode#1 as a starting point for the Ethereal case. If others want to do the same for the rest of the *-omarchy extensions, would help VSCodium users a lot.