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Vinícius Campos edited this page Aug 22, 2026 · 2 revisions

Graphite and Focus Themes

Two theme families for Visual Studio, packaged and installed as independent VSIX extensions. They share a colour-role taxonomy and a set of editor emphasis rules, but nothing else: installing one does not install the other, and either can be used on its own.

Both extensions target Visual Studio 17.9 through 18.x on AMD64 and ARM64.

Graphite Theme

A pair built on the Andromeda palette: a near-black dark theme and a warm-grey light theme derived from it. One hue per broad token group — all type names share a colour, all names share another. It is the quieter of the two families and the only one with a light variant.

See Graphite Themes for the palettes.

Focus Themes

Six dark themes built for fast scanning. Their distinguishing feature is that each gives the five C# type kinds — class, interface, record, struct and enum — a colour of its own, so a data shape does not read as a service. The six directions are Voltage, Ultraviolet, Reactor, Arcade, Signal and Nightdive.

See Focus Themes for the palettes and the rationale behind each direction.

Who they are for

Anyone who spends the day reading C# in Visual Studio rather than writing it in short bursts. Both families are built on the same premise: no two token classes should read alike, so that "what kind of name is this" is answerable without hovering. Focus pushes that further and pays for it in saturation; Graphite Dark and Graphite Light are the calmer options.

Installing

From the Visual Studio Marketplace:

Open Extensions > Manage Extensions in Visual Studio, search for the extension name, and choose Download.

The .vsix packages are also attached to each GitHub Release, with a SHA256SUMS.txt to verify against.

Once installed, pick a theme in Tools > Options > Environment > General > Color theme.

Pages

  • Focus Themes — the six directions, their rationale and their palettes
  • Graphite Themes — Graphite Dark and Graphite Light
  • Color Roles — what each role paints, and why two of them are tints
  • Customizing — overriding any colour without editing the extension
  • Contributing — how palettes are changed, and what must never be hand-edited

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