A dark theme for VS Code, inspired by the album art of Megadeth's 1990 metal masterpiece, Rust in Peace.

Colour Palette

The complete palettes, including ANSI terminal colours, live in src/palette.json (dark) and src/palette-light.json (Dawn Patrol).

Hand-picked from the record's rusted, cobalt-blue cover art.

Rust in Peace

Hangar 18

Polaris

Dawn Patrol

Installation

Install straight from the Visual Studio Marketplace, or from inside the editor:

1. Open the Extensions sidebar in VS Code — View → Extensions
2. Search for Megadeth (curse you, rust-lang!!!)
3. Click Install
4. Preferences: Color Theme (or File → Preferences → Theme → Color Theme) and pick Rust in Peace, Rust in Peace Hangar 18, Rust in Peace Polaris, or Rust in Peace Dawn Patrol

Companion themes

The VS Code theme isn't the only target. Matching themes for other tools are generated into ports/. Every target ships all four variants — core, Hangar 18, Polaris, and Dawn Patrol (light) — as separate files, except Zed, whose single file is a theme family carrying all four:

Tool	Generated files
Helix	ports/helix/*.toml
Herdr	ports/herdr/*.toml
Zed	ports/zed/rust-in-peace.json
Zellij	ports/zellij/*.kdl
Ptyxis	ports/ptyxis/*.palette

Copy the relevant file into your tool's theme directory, then select rust-in-peace (or a variant slug). Run just build-ports to regenerate them all after a palette change.

Herdr has no standalone theme files — its files are config fragments to merge into ~/.config/herdr/config.toml, recolouring the tokyo-night base theme (tokyo-night-day for Dawn Patrol).

Contributing

To work on the theme:

1. Clone this repo and open it in VS Code
2. Run just setup (or mise install, uv sync, and npm ci) to provision the toolchain
3. Open View → Run
4. Click Launch Theme (or Launch Theme (with extensions)) — this opens a second VS Code window
5. Target scopes with the Developer: Inspect Editor Tokens and Scopes command
6. Edit src/rust-in-peace.yml and run npm run build; changes appear live in the window from step 4

Colours live in src/palette.json and src/palette-light.json; src/rust-in-peace.yml maps them onto VS Code keys via {{group.key}} placeholders. Edit the palette to shift a colour everywhere at once.

Please include before & after screenshots of your changes in pull requests.

Maintainer & publishing notes

Recipes

Local tasks run through just — run just to list them all.

Recipe	Purpose
just setup	Provision the toolchain (mise) and install Python/npm dependencies
just check	Run the full code-quality suite (lint, types, tests + coverage, dead code, duplication, secrets)
just build	Regenerate theme JSON, companion ports, and README art
just build-ports	Regenerate the companion themes (Helix, Herdr, Zed, Zellij, Ptyxis)
just install	Build, package, and install the extension into local VS Code
just publish-patch	Bump the patch version, tag, and push to publish
just publish-minor	Bump the minor version, tag, and push to publish

A tag push drafts a release; publishing the draft deploys the release VSIX to the Marketplace. Global Azure DevOps PATs stop working 1 Dec 2026; confirm the VSCE_PAT repo secret is org-scoped or replace it before then.

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Also check out the Slayer Reign in Blood theme.