Contribute to this Project

Before jumping in, I'd say that the VS Code theme color reference is a really great resource to get started with.

Fork this repo
Open the forked repo in your terminal and run npm install
Start to watch for changes with npm start - this runs a nodemon task that creates a .vsix file in the root directory and will automatically recompile any changes you make - it might take a while to create.
Open the repo in VS Code
Launch your command palette Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P and type VSIX. Select the one that says Extensions: Install from VSIX...
Load the VSIX file you created a few steps back
Set your editor to use this theme - change the name in package.json to something like "Palenight Dev" so you can differentiate from the initial theme you installed from the Marketplace.
Go to the debug sidebar View → Debug
Hit the green arrow beside "Launch Extension" - opens a new window
Make a change, and then hit the refresh button on your debug toolbar - this is in your first editor - not the one that popped open.
Wait a sec, your changes should now be reflected!
Duplicate your changes in the other variants
Commit your changes to your fork of this repo
Send a PR that contains detailed information about your change
I'll review it, and decide whether it should be merged 📖.

Things You might want to help with

Automate copying every change in a JSON file into the variants. Say, you edit palenight.json, your changes should get duplicated in palenight-italic.json and palenight-operator.json.
Create a functionality that'll group the code for each language in separate files. Say, javascript.json, css.json and would automtically be merged into one file on build.
Create a high contrast variant.
Help update the Atom version.

If you get stuck somewhere, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter 😄.