James Quick
This tutorial is out of date and no longer maintained.
Visual Studio Code is incredibly easy to customize, including adding some awesome looking themes. Themes can give your editor a lot of personality and make it more fun to work with. Let’s take a look at some of the hottest themes to use in 2019!
Check out Learn Visual Studio Code to learn everything you need to know about Visual Studio Code!
If you’re new to VS Code, you can install themes through the extension panel in VS Code. You can open the extension panel and type in a search. If you find a theme you like, you can click the install button. You’ll have to reload after installing, but other than that, there’s nothing to it.
After installing your theme and restarting, you can activate it by going to the gear icon in the bottom left, and choose “Color Theme”. (You can also access this from the command palette by using (cmd+shift+p).
Then, choose your theme.
For reference, I’m going to include a screenshot of the same piece of code for each theme for easy comparison.
This theme was created by Sarah Drasner who is highly regarded in the CSS community. It is perfect for those of us late owls who stay up late working on exciting projects. Sarah obviously has a great eye for design and Night Owl proves it.
Speaking of Sarah Drasner, she works with John Papa who came out this seasonal themed theme, Winter is Coming. Technically, this was released in late 2017, but it has gained its popularity in 2018. With it still being the winter season, I think this one is pretty cool (pun intended!!).
There’s also a light version.
If you’re looking for another option to learn more about Visual Studio Code, the author of this theme also released VS Code Power User! This course is jam packed with content on becoming a power user of VS Code!
If you’re looking for a theme with multiple themes built in, Rainglow has tons of them for you. This a great way to check out a bunch of different combinations of colors to see what you like the most. Technically released in late late 2017, but still.
You can see the code in the background, but also notice how many choices there are.
Noctis is another one with several different options. Not as many as Rainglow above, but still a a few different ones to look at. This theme in particular has had immense success in less than a year. Definitely worth a look.
and a light version…
Monokai is making a comeback with this Pro theme.
It comes in various color schemes so you can take your pic. Heads up, there is a paid component to this theme.
Let us know in the comments and we’ll add more themes to this post! Thanks for reading.
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