CRT UI - A VSCode theme overhaul

I'm a huge fan of the classic Fallout games and of the whole CRT look, generally speaking, so I made this thing you're seeing here and, because I couldn't find anything to scratch that itch before, I decided to release it as I know there's other folks that share my dubious taste.

I know that the awesome CRT Themes has been out there for a while and if you're looking for just a color change with the same old-school feel, then I'd recommend getting that one as it is a lot lighter (performance wise) than this.

The CRT UI will change both the workbench styles (font, icon colours, border colours, etc) and it includes a syntax theme based on the green one from CRT Themes and add some cool effects here and there (glow, scanlines and static noise).

You can use any other syntax theme but it will look weird. Your call.

I have tried to add some frame overlay and screen curvature using shaders and WebGl, but, to my knowledge, that's not possible on VSCode currently. If anyone out there has ideas or more knowledge on that regard and want to try their hand on this, feel free to open a PR.

So, if you're looking for something to emulate the bad refresh-rate, hard to read text and retina burning bright colours, you may have found it.

Screenshots

Bellow you'll see some shots with the different theme options to choose.

The sreenshots make it look a bit worse than what it actually is. I'm blaming the static noise effect for the crappy appearance on the screenshots.

For those wondering, the colours selected are the converted values from phosphor wavelenghts used on those CRT monitors, except for the blue one, which is converted from a phosphor wavelength, but that wasn't used on any monochrome monitors other than those from Apperture Laboratories.

Themes

Default

Default with alt syntax theme

Green 1

Green 2

Apple II

Apple IIc

Amber

Blue

Install

1. Install the extension
2. Start VSCode as admin !important
3. Select one of the CRT themes
4. Run > CRT: Enable theme
5. Restart VSCode

After that, you can change the theme to any other, but 3rd party ones will lack integration, of course.

Optional but highly recommended

The workbench font has been changed to a more suitable one (as in more fitting with the CRT aesthetic), namelly OCR-A, which you can download here, otherwise it'll fallback to Consolas and Courier New, in that order. Not that any of this matter though.

Uninstall

1. Run VSCode as admin !important
2. Run > CRT: Disable theme. Very important to run this first as it will remove the injected styles.
3. Uninstall the extension as you normally would.
4. Restart VSCode

Note: If you uninstall the extension without running the > CRT: Disable theme command you will end up with leftover styles and your VSCode looking like limp poo (panik). You'll have to manually delete the code from the workbench.html, which, on Windows, is normally located at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Programs\Microsoft VS Code\resources\app\out\vs\code\electron-browser\workbench\workbench.html. I have no clue where that file would be on other OSs, but you're supposed to be an engineer, so you'll find it somehow.

1. Open that file and delete the <style> and <script> tags you'll find there before the closing </html> tag.
2. Kalm!

Things to keep in mind:

• This is not intended to make things more ergonomical, friendly, easy on the eyes or easier to read. In fact, it will make things harder to read but that's the nature of these effects.
• Although I tried to keep performance the best possible, you'll still notice more CPU and GPU usage as the effects are resource hungry, not Crysis like, but still more demanding than the vanilla VSCode is.