Some time ago I wrote A Kind of Blue to explain why the Blue theme did not survive the Fluent refresh in Visual Studio. The short version was that Blue did not meet our accessibility standards, and the new tinted themes were designed around three pillars: cohesiveness, productivity, and accessibility.
The fuller answer arrived in the June update to Visual Studio 2026. The team shipped a new Theme colors options page that lets you override any Fluent color token directly in the IDE; no extension required, no marketplace detour. Customizations are saved per theme, and individual tokens can be reset without wiping everything else. The release notes describe it, and the underlying surface area is documented in the theme color token reference.
This is the right answer, and a better one than re-shipping any particular theme would have been. Blue was only the loudest variant of the request. Other people wanted darker than Dark, lighter than Light, no borders at all, or simply hated every design we offered. Re-shipping Blue would have settled exactly one argument, and not even the largest one. Opening the tokens settles all of them, including the ones we have not heard yet. The persistent thread across community tickets like Once more we ask for the Blue Theme back was never a request for one palette. It was a request for agency.
To make that concrete, I published three small JSON files:
- Classic Blue, recreated — periwinkle background, slate body, warm tan tabs, navy status bar.
- Dark, quieted — accents pushed to near-black so buttons and borders stop drawing the eye.
- Light, flattened — accents pushed toward white so the chrome reads as faint outlines on a uniform canvas.
For more comprehensive changes, a full theme pack like Mads Kristensen's Blue Steel is still the right tool. For small overrides, this is the way. I suspect communities of taste will form around particular sets of tokens the way they form around color schemes in Vim or Emacs.
A Kind of Blue ended with a recommendation for Cool Breeze. I still recommend it. But for anyone who read that post and quietly wished the answer were a little more in their hands, the answer now is.
