_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank" rel="ugc" href="https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=silofy.hackthebox">VS Code theme on the marketplace. I made it for myself, dark, neon, unapologetic, and figured a handful of CTF nerds might install it. It's now past 225,000 downloads.

That experience taught me more about editor themes than I ever expected to learn. A few things I didn't see coming:

People use your theme for 8 hours a day.

Every unreadable comment, every low-contrast parameter, every token you forgot to style, they all become a GitHub issue within a week. You learn fast.

"Looks cool in a screenshot" and "holds up in a real codebase" are different products.

My first version photographed beautifully and was exhausting to actually work in. I rebuilt it twice.

Every editor is its own country.

Porting HTB to JetBrains was a month of work. Zed was another week. Neovim had its own semantic token model. I kept shipping inconsistent versions across editors because syncing them by hand was miserable.

Accessibility isn't optional at scale.

Once you're past ~10k installs, every mistake is affecting real humans with real eyes on real monitors. I started measuring contrast after users told me comments were invisible on their laptops, and I found my own theme was failing WCAG AA in places. Humbling.

Themery is the tool I wish I'd had when I shipped HTB.

Describe a vibe, get a theme. Tell it "warm terminal amber, late-night, low eye strain" and it generates a full palette for you. Or bring your own colors, either way, every token lands on a contrast tier (critical, structural, semantic, contextual, ambient) with an enforced floor, validated against both WCAG 2.1 and APCA (the perceptual contrast model that's actually accurate for text on screens). One source of truth compiles to VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, JetBrains, Zed, Neovim, and every major terminal, all at once, all consistent, all actually legible.

It's the answer to every issue I ever got on Hack The Box, crystallized into a tool so the next generation of theme designers doesn't have to learn it the hard way.

Free for everyone, forever:
- AI theme generation (unlimited)
- VS Code export
- Terminal exports, Alacritty, Kitty, Warp, iTerm2, Windows Terminal

Pro, one-time $4.99, lifetime:
- All other IDEs (Cursor, Windsurf, JetBrains, Zed, Neovim)
- Dark + Light export together
- Animations export
- All 13 icon libraries + color overrides
- APCA auto-fix to AAA
- AI-generated Marketplace README
- Procedural SVG extension icon
- One-click Marketplace publish
- Cloud-saved themes (no expiry)

No subscription. Pay once, own it.
To celebrate the launch, use THEMERY60 at checkout for 60% off for the first 1000 users

I'll be in the comments all day. Would especially love feedback from anyone shipping a theme of their own, you know exactly what this is for.

- Tiago

Themery reviews