Issue #52  (Color Themes in VS Code)04/19/23

Here are a couple of things to know about choosing a color theme in VS Code that you might find useful.

First of all, as you likely know, VS Code comes bundled with a number of themes you can try out. You can access the theme options by choosing File > Preferences > Theme > Color Theme. The same menu can be displayed much more quickly using the keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD-K + CTRL/CMD-T. This shows you a number of themes divided into categories for dark and light.
 
The currently selected theme will be highlighted in the list. You can click to select any theme but if you use the up/down arrow keys, you'll be able to quickly preview any of the themes in the list.

I often share third-party themes in the tools list in this newsletter, but if you want to search the VS Code Marketplace specifically for color themes, you can open the Extensions sidebar panel and type @category:"themes" in the search box. This will filter the to display extensions in the themes category only.
 
And finally, you can allow VS Code to select dark vs. light themes automatically based on your OS preferences. Open your VS Code Settings and search for "window.autoDetectColorScheme" to enable or disable this. This can be useful if your Operating System is set to change to dark or light mode at certain times, which will allow VS Code to follow suit.

Along with this, you can search for "workbench.preferred" and you'll see 4 other related settings.
 
These allow you to set your preferred themes for dark, high contrast, light, and high contrast light. These selections will be used based on your chosen values for autoDetectColorScheme and autoDetectHighContrast.

Now on to this week's hand-picked links!

 

VS Code Tools

Refact — A powerful AI coding assistant for VS Code and JetBrains that combines completion, refactoring, chat, and more.

Tailwind Config Viewer — VS Code extension that lets you view the tailwind.config.js of your Tailwind project in a sidebar, showing you the colors, fonts, spacing, etc. that you've defined.

Tech Productivity — A brief weekly newsletter featuring tips, tools, and articles on productivity, work culture, remote work, well-being, brain science, and more.  Sponsor 

Catppuccin Theme — A community-driven pastel theme that aims to be the middle ground between low and high contrast themes, available for IDEs, developer tools, and more.

CloudFormation Snippets — A VS Code extension that adds snippets for all the AWS CloudFormation resources into your editor.

VS Code Articles & Videos

Debugging Multiple .NET Projects in VS Code — Something you might want to be able to do if you're working on .NET projects in VS Code.

▶ Accessibility with VS Code — A recent one-hour live stream from the VS Code team on YouTube that covers building accessibility into the planning stages of programming so you can create an inclusive environment for all.

VS Code Recipes — A GitHub repo from Microsoft that includes a collection of "recipes" for using VS Code with particular technologies.

Bytes: Your Favourite JavaScript Newsletter — I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but this is definitely one I look forward to. Entertaining with lots of cool and useful JavaScript coding tidbits, news, and tools.  Sponsor 
 

Best of the Rest

Vimium — A Chrome extension that provides keyboard shortcuts for navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor.

Bruno — A fast, Git-friendly API client aimed at revolutionizing the status quo represented by Postman and similar tools.

CI Dashboard — A set of plugins for JetBrains IDEs that lets you manage your CI. Includes options for GitLab, GitHub, Travis CI, Netlify, Heroku, and more.

Suggestions?

If you have any link suggestions, including a tool, article, or other resources related to VS Code or another IDE, send it via DM on X: @LouisLazaris or just hit reply on this email.

That's it for this issue.

Happy VS Coding!
Louis
VSCode.Email
@LouisLazaris