🎨 Celebrating 1 Million+ Developer Users of My VSCode Shades of Purple Theme
Tags: vscode, onedevminute
Published: 2019-04-03 16:23:29

---
title: 🎨 Celebrating 1 Million+ Developer Users of My VSCode Shades of Purple Theme
published: true
description: Celebrating over one million downloads and half a million active installs of my VSCode Shades of Purple theme suite. Thanks to the awesome developers community.
tags: VSCode, OneDevMinute
canonical_url: https://ahmadawais.com/1-million-developers-using-shades-of-purple-theme/
cover_image: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ahmadawais/shades-of-purple-vscode/master/images/1_sop.gif
---

> This post is a part of my [2018 Year in Review: Open Source, Node.js, & Developer Relations](https://ahmadawais.com/2018-year-in-review/). That's what you should read for the context.

That's right. Something incredibly amazing happened last year. After switching to [VSCode](https://VSCode.pro/?utm_source=aacom), I struggled with finding a good theme that was actually built for VSCode and not just a theme migrated from another editor. 

So, I built this suit of themes called `🦄 Shades of Purple` for [VSCode](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ahmadawais.shades-of-purple), [iTerm2](https://github.com/ahmadawais/shades-of-purple-iterm2), [Hyper Terminal](https://github.com/ahmadawais/shades-of-purple-hyper), [Slack](https://github.com/ahmadawais/shades-of-purple-slack), [AlfredApp](https://github.com/ahmadawais/shades-of-purple-alfred), [HighlightJS](https://github.com/ahmadawais/Shades-of-Purple-HighlightJS), [Prism React](https://github.com/FormidableLabs/prism-react-renderer/blob/master/themes/shadesOfPurple.js), [Code Surfer](https://code-surfer.netlify.com/theming/#8), and even got community contributions in the form of the same theme being ported for [Cygwin](https://github.com/ahmadawais/Shades-of-Purple-Cygwin) and [Konsole](https://github.com/ahmadawais/shades-of-purple-konsole). Proud of it, AH! 

[![Shades Of Purple](https://ahmadawais.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/shades-of-purple.gif)](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ahmadawais.shades-of-purple)

 ✅ When you build something to solve your own problems and share it with others (especially as a Free & Open Source Software) chances are it can click well with them. This is exactly what happened here. 

🤔 I was building the LMS platform to host my [VSCode.pro](https://VSCode.pro) course. I would code the same logic as the video end event in JavaScript, PHP, Go-lang, CSS, and HTML. So, a variable like `videoEnd` had representation in all these languages. Interesting?! 

❌ Guess what? Every programming language would color the variables different. At one time I had yellow, blue, pink, red, and green colors as the syntax highlighting for the same damn variable across different languages. That would mess my brain up. 

🤯 So, I went ahead and built a theme that's consistent enough across 30+ languages and is inspired by many great themes. I got a couple of designer friends to review the theme's design and worked on its accessibility. 

⚡️ This project quickly became my favorite side-project and has helped me become a better programmer. I know the data types by their color (so when things go wrong my brain can pick it up before a linter does). Amazing! 

😮 What happened with the Shades of Purple project was beyond any kind of growth I have ever seen for my open source software. Maybe it's the awesome VSCode community or just maybe for once I created something really useful. Who knows. Check out the stats:

*   **Over a million developer users of my theme** — wow that puts things in perspective. I mean serious-f\*\*\*-ly (pardon my french).
*   I've released **over a hundred version updates** for the entire suite of Shade of Purple themes. All that in one year. #TrueThat!
*   I feel like I connect with so many developers on a daily basis. A simple theme update can make their lives easier. **They know I care.**
*   An average developer spends several hours daily writing code. So, thousands of developers **use my theme for several hours daily**.
*   It feels like I've created sort of a Facebook (without creepy privacy issues of course) where all my users are my people (I mean developers). It feels good to keep improving it in an agile-manner.
*   Check out the small bit of sorcery I pulled off for potential time-travel using my [Emoji-log](https://github.com/AhmadAwais/Emoji-Log) git commit spec to build an [automated Changelog](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ahmadawais.shades-of-purple/changelog) that's actually worth a read (excuse the course ad, gotta support all this free and open source work to put food on the table).

> WOW! OK, maybe that's too much. But hey, I love it. Shades of Purple theme has created the sort of a geeky **#PurpleRevolution**. Everyone knows I love the purple color. **Purple is genius**.

Peace! ✌️

> Go ahead and install the 🦄 [Shades of Purple VSCode theme](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ahmadawais.shades-of-purple) →

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