Choosing a VSCode Theme

Ever since I was first introduced to Visual Studio Code, I loved it. Everything about it is really good. One of the things that other people really like in it is the extension support.

I personally, didn't really mess around with extensions much because I really liked the default stock experience. One extension I did install, was the live server plugin, which allows you to preview HTML and CSS as you work on a page. It's not perfect but it gets the job done.

Recently, I was reintroduced to extentending VSCode's abilities (and more specifically, aesthetics) when I watched a JavaScript tutorial and they had the coolest looking VSCode I've ever seen. So, I started looking for some nice themes.

My main issue with themes right now, is that I'm really used to the default VSCode theme and it's hard to switch.

I tried out the Material Theme which is described on the Visual Studio market place as

The most epic theme meets Visual Studio Code

which sounds like it's a very cool theme. It was alright, but after a bit of usage, you start to notice some imperfections which make it look a bit strange.

Another theme that I found was the Synthwave '84 theme, which looks really cool. One of the main "selling points" of the theme was that it had glowing text.

a screenshot taken from the Synthwave '84 page on the Visual Studio marketplace

It looks, really cool. One of the weird downsides to it was that VSCode doesn't support adding text effects directly through a theme, so Synthwave '84 has to modify some core files from VSCode to enable some of the more cool features (you can enable them in the Command Pallete under Enable Neon Dreams).

This is an issue because VSCode checks it's code against a checksum to make sure nothing is corrupted or has been changed. It'll show a warning about needing to reinstall VSCode to fix it.

the warning that VSCode will show you

This was pretty easy to remove, you can either just tell it to never show the message again, or install another extenstion that will remake the checksum so that VSCode thinks nothing is wrong.

but does it look good?

Obviously it depends a lot on preference, right now I'm liking it, but if I don't like it in the future, I'll go back to the default.

But, just look at this gradient, what's not to love?

The one downside of this theme, is that since it has to do some hacky things to work, I'll have to re-enable it everytime I update VSCode.

So, that's about it. Thanks for reading.