Show HN: Personalized themes for VSCode + 25 editors, powered by color science

Base16 is great – by all means, use it if it fits your needs! I used to use it myself and I still maintain the base16 templates for kitty and Termux.

That being said, here's why I made Hueflake:

1. Limited colors. 16 colors (8 neutral, 8 colored) is just not enough for comprehensive UI coverage, especially for editors. Because of this, I only used Base16 for terminals and was not satisfied with any of the editor themes (some UI elements are stuck with misfit colors). Even terminals are affected because bright ANSI colors can't be distinguished, leading to information loss in some contexts. Hueflake avoids these issues because it can dynamically generate any colors needed for full app coverage, and uses a far larger palette internally.

This also meant that my terminal themes didn't match my editors, making context switching slightly more disruptive.

2. Limited customizability. It's tedious to pick coherent colors manually. Changing hues used for editor syntax highlighting can also have unintended effects on terminals, so most Base16 themes have more or less the same hues

I ended up making my own Base16 theme based on GitHub's VS Code theme, but it was quite a tedious process of picking colors and testing, and I wasn't even making a theme from scratch. Hueflake makes all of this easier and hopefully saves you a lot of time if you decide to go this route.

As I said though, there's nothing wrong with Base16 if it works for you!

Will consider it, thanks for the suggestion! As an interim solution, are there any languages in particular that you'd like to see?

I totally understand your hesitation as most themes are free, although there is precedent for paid/freemium themes (Monokai Pro, Dracula Pro, Material Theme UI for IntelliJ).

Hueflake's main differentiators are high quality (consistent, expressive colors without the misfits/unthemed elements that many themes have), customizability (tailor to your tastes without manually picking 50 colors that work well together), and consistency across editors (in terms of both colors and quality).

My hope is that Hueflake provides enough value that it's worth it, but it's certainly possible that you don't see much value in it and that's okay. Thanks for taking a look :)