How to specify colour for dark and light theme in general in VSCode user settings - visual-studio-code

Question

I'd like to customize VSCode colour settings in general for dark or light theme variants, for example:
"workbench.colorCustomizations": {
"light": {
"editor.background": "#ff0000",
}
}
To my knowledge, however, it's only possible to define colours for all situations or for specific themes, e.g.
"workbench.colorCustomizations": {
"editor.background": "#ff0000",
"[Default Light+]": {
"editor.background": "#ff0000"
}
}
Problem with this solution is, that it applies everywhere or for one specific theme, not any light-variant theme in general.
Actually, colours do have default values for dark/light/high-contrast variants. For example, when adding colour through contributes.colors in an extension's package.json, this is how one does it:
"contributes": {
"colors": [
{
"id": "mycolour",
"description": "my colour",
"defaults": {
"dark": "#ffffff",
"light": "#000000",
"highContrast": "#010203"
}
}
]
}
Is there any way to customize a colour's generic variants in the user settings, just like in contributes.colors? The documentation I've found on this topic is not what I'd call exhaustive (just a few examples basically), but there might be things that I missed. Also, I used workbench.* in the above examples because I'm mostly interested in that setting, not in the editor.* colour settings.

Answer 1

Looks like based on #uEv340yQ3gU1's answer that for the time being this feature isn't supported. However over at https://stackoverflow.com/a/69200037/17196251 I found out that specifying multiple themes and wildcards are now supported! See https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_59#_extended-theme-customization-syntax
We can do a decent workaround by specifying the wildcard [*Light*] or [*Dark*] (along with any themes you use often e.g. Monokai). Looks something like this
"workbench.colorCustomizations": {
// Default
"editor.background": "#000000",
// Exception for light themes
"[*Light*][AnotherTheme]": {
"editor.background": "#ffffff"
}
}
I currently use this for specifying custom bracket colorization to use white for the first bracket on dark themes and black on light themes! Woo

Answer 2

As it turns out, it's not possible yet. There's a feature request for this functionality (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/101418), so, hopefully, it might be added in the future.