• Creating your theme is the fun part. • After you’re done, the next step is to publish your theme so you - and others - can enjoy your creation! • You’d think that publishing a VS Code extension is an easy process, but it’s not. • (Maybe I’m used to the ease of publishing npm packages and take registries for granted.) Anyway, you have to publish your theme in two places: - Visual Studio Marketplace for VS Code users - Open VSX for other text editors You might also want to publish to npm for others to use your theme easily for other contexts - like syntax highlighting via Shiki. • Preparing your theme When you name your theme, you cannot put it under a scope like @scope/theme-name . • Doing so will prevent you from publishing to Open VSX.
Article Summaries:
- Summary
The article explains how to publish a Visual Studio Code theme extension to both the Visual Studio Marketplace and Open VSX, noting that themes must be unscoped to be accepted by Open VSX. It outlines key package.json requirements-name, icon, contributes, and keywords-to ensure discoverability. The author details two publishing routes: using the vsce CLI with an Azure DevOps personal access token (which expires after about a year) and a manual upload via the Marketplace website. The author shares personal difficulties setting up Azure DevOps, suggesting patience and retrying if the process stalls. The guide concludes with the final vsce publish command to complete the release.
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