VS Code colour theme · a fork of Robb Owen's SynthWave '84

Neon Dreams, without patching VS Code

SynthWave '84 is the synthwave colour theme for VS Code created by Robb Owen; the theme and its neon glow are his design. This fork keeps both and rebuilds how the glow is delivered.

The original turned the glow on by editing VS Code's own files, which raised the "Your Code installation appears to be corrupt" warning, needed administrator rights on Windows and broke on every update. This fork uses the extension API instead.

Source code

What this fork does

Glow without patching

No corrupt-install warning, no restart, no administrator rights, and the glow survives VS Code updates.

Glow wherever code is

Editors, diff and peek views and hovers glow; switching theme turns it all off.

A Neon toggle

In the status bar, and as the Toggle Neon Dreams command.

Settings

Glow brightness, glow per colour, and each editor accent on or off, applied at once.

Visible controls

Checkboxes, input borders and the focus ring reach at least 3:1 contrast; brackets, inlay hints and icons use the palette.

Upkeep

The glow no longer vanishes at low brightness; stale rules are gone; manifest, localisation and tests are current.

Install it

This fork is not on the Marketplace. It keeps the original extension id, RobbOwen.synthwave-vscode, so installing it replaces the Marketplace version. Build it with Node and pnpm from mise, install the package, then choose the SynthWave '84 colour theme and click Neon in the status bar.

mise install
pnpm install
pnpm test
pnpm package
code --install-extension synthwave-vscode-<version>.vsix

Credits and licence

SynthWave '84 was created by Robb Owen in 2019 and released under the MIT licence, which this fork keeps. The theme, the glow and editor styles, the banner and screenshot are his work. Changes since the fork are © 2026 Arziel.

Original project: github.com/robb0wen/synthwave-vscode.

Privacy

A colour theme plus an optional glow, inside VS Code: no network requests, telemetry or analytics. Its settings live in your normal VS Code settings. Its one write outside them: if it finds the old Neon Dreams patch (versions up to 0.1.20) in VS Code's workbench.html, it removes that patch and says so.

This page stores only your light or dark choice, whether you hid the intro, and your answer to the notice, all on this device.