Best Colorful VSCode Extensions – How to Personalize Your Editor

As a seasoned software engineer with over a decade of experience across the stack, I can confidently say that one of the best (and easiest) ways to boost your mood and productivity as a developer is to personalize your coding environment. We spend the majority of our waking hours in our text editors, so why not make them a joy to inhabit?

The psychological impact of color on our mental state is well-documented. A study by the University of Texas found that bland gray, beige and white offices induced feelings of sadness and depression, especially in women. Conversely, the introduction of vibrant colors was shown to increase happiness, satisfaction, and an overall sense of well-being.

Luckily, with the advent of modern extensible code editors like VSCode, we have free rein to splash our favorite hues across our digital workspace. Beyond the purely aesthetic, thoughtful color-coding can have functional benefits as well, like helping you visually track scope, spot errors, and keep your place across complex codebases.

As an avid VSCode user and color connoisseur myself, I‘ve spent countless hours optimizing my editor to achieve the perfect blend of form and function. And now I want to share my curated list of the best color-enhancing extensions to help you do the same.

Setting the Tone with Themes

First up, you‘ll want to pick a base theme that matches your vibe. VSCode has an impressive library of both light and dark themes, but I tend to gravitate towards the dark side for its easy-on-the-eyes contrast. Here are some of the most beloved options according to the VSCode marketplace:

• Dracula Official – 1.3M+ installs. A dark theme with a cool purple base and bright pink, green, and orange accents.
• One Dark Pro – 1.8M+ installs. The classic Atom theme featuring a sleek gray background with a blue and purple palette.
• Material Theme – 1.7M+ installs. An extensive family of themes with a signature bold, saturated style available in 5 color variants.
• Night Owl – 824K+ installs. A carefully balanced dark theme fine-tuned for working late into the night with accessibility in mind.
• Cobalt2 – 350K+ installs. Wes Bos‘ signature vibrant theme featuring a dark blue background and bold text colors.

Can‘t decide? I recommend installing a few and test driving them for a day or two each. It‘s amazing how much a simple palette swap can shift your coding mindset. Don‘t be afraid to step outside your comfort zone!

Personally, I always come back to Dracula for its undeniably cool Transylvania vibes. The chic purple undertones and selective pops of pink and green make me feel like I‘m coding from a shadowy castle. Here‘s a sneak peek:

Painting Your Indent Rainbow

Now that you‘ve set the stage with a jazzy theme, it‘s time to start layering on some custom upgrades. One of my absolute must-haves is the Indent Rainbow extension.

As the name implies, this handy tool colorizes the indentation in front of your text, alternating between four cheery colors. It serves as a quick visual indicator of nesting level, making it a breeze to delineate code blocks at a glance. I especially appreciate how it helps me keep my JSX nice and tidy.

Before Indent Rainbow:

After Indent Rainbow:

If you really want to spice things up, pair it with Indent Rainbow Palettes for access to additional color schemes. My top pick is the aptly named "Rainbow" palette, which cycles through the classic ROYGBIV hues for a bright and playful effect that sparks joy as I traverse my deeply nested component trees.

Untangling Brackets in Style

Nothing disrupts a good coding flow like a gnarly nest of mismatched brackets and parentheses. That‘s where Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 comes in clutch.

This popular extension (7.8M+ installs and counting!) colorizes matching brackets to help you quickly identify pairs and root out any strays. While recent updates to VSCode include some basic bracket parsing, I still swear by this extension for its unparalleled customization options, like unique colors for different bracket types, independent color pools for different depths, and the ability to exclude specific languages.

Pro-tip: Kick it up a notch by tweaking your theme‘s bracket colors to match. May I recommend a vivid anime-inspired palette? The Outrun theme‘s cyan and magenta combo is chef‘s kiss.

Instant Color Gratification

As a frontend-leaning engineer, I spend a lot of time fiddling with colors in my CSS and design systems. And let me tell you, the Colorize extension has been an absolute game-changer.

Colorize parses your code and displays a preview of any color values right in your editor. It supports every format you can dream up – hex codes, RGB(A), HSL(A), and named colors across CSS, SASS, LESS, Stylus, and more. No more squinting at a tiny swatch or pulling up your color picker for every tweak. Behold the magic:

But the color fun doesn‘t stop there! VSCode also offers an ever-growing ecosystem of visually-oriented extensions to delight designers and frontend devs. A few more of my favorites:

• Color Highlight – Similar to Colorize, but allows for more flexible customization of the color preview.
• Color Tabs – Tints your editor tabs to match the dominant color of the file‘s language icon. Handy for organizing views at a glance!
• Pigments – Displays palette previews of all the colors in your project files. Great for maintaining consistency across larger codebases.

Hues for Project Management

Even with all these dazzling themes and chromatic tools, sometimes you just need a simple visual differentiator between your sprawling project windows. Enter Peacock.

Peacock is a clever extension that lets you assign a unique color to each of your VSCode workspaces. It‘ll tint the title bar, activity bar, and status bar to your chosen hue, making it easy to tell at a glance which project you‘re looking at. You can go as bold or subtle as you like, with options to colorize just the title bar text or the entire window/title bar border.

I find it particularly useful when I‘m juggling both my work and personal projects in the same editor. I tint my professional windows a serious, understated blue, while my hobby projects get a vivid purple. Here‘s a quick before and after:

Before Peacock:

After Peacock:

Peacock recently introduced the ability to save your favorite colors for even easier access across projects. You can summon them with a quick command palette shortcut whenever you‘re kicking off a new workspace. Delightful design details FTW!

Iconic File Navigation

While not exactly a "color" extension per se, I‘d be remiss not to mention the productivity powerhouse that is vscode-icons.

This essential extension adds file and folder icons to your VSCode sidebar, making it easier to distinguish between the different parts of your project at a glance. With over 1000 icons (and counting) covering everything from your core web languages to frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue, you‘ll be hard-pressed to find a filetype that isn‘t represented.

Here‘s a small preview of how it can tidy up even the most sprawling of repositories:

Before vscode-icons:

After vscode-icons:

The icons are detailed enough to convey meaning without being overly distracting. And if you really want to go full unicorn mode (guilty!), you can even enable a special icon for your config files. Because why should package.json be left out of the theming fun?

Highlighting TODOs in Technicolor

Last but certainly not least, I have to give a shoutout to one of my most used (and most vibrantly colored) extensions: TODO Highlight.

As the name suggests, TODO Highlight adds eye-catching background colors to your TODO and FIXME comments in code. By default, TODOs will get a cheery yellow background, while FIXMEs are assigned an urgent red hue. But the real magic is in the ability to add your own custom keywords and colors.

I like to use a bright orange for NOTE, a soft blue for INFO, and a vivid purple for HACK. That way, I can easily scan my code for areas that need attention, without cluttering up my mental map with the same level of visual priority. Here‘s a peek at my technicolor comment rainbow:

And if you really want to kick your highlight game into high gear, try pairing it with the Todo Tree extension. Together, they‘ll scan your entire project for annotated comments and display them in a convenient sidebar view for the ultimate bird‘s eye tracking experience.

Indulge Your Inner Unicorn

At the end of the day, the "best" VSCode setup is the one that sparks joy and empowers you to tap into your most creative, productive self. For some, that might mean a minimalist grayscale theme with nary a colored bracket in sight. For others (like yours truly), it means leaning into the full stack of color-drenched extensions with reckless abandon.

The beauty of VSCode lies in its infinite customization potential. With just a few clicks, you can transform your editor from a sterile white canvas into a vibrant playground perfectly tailored to your aesthetic preferences and workflow.

So go ahead – let your freak flag fly! Deck out your function blocks in Lisa Frank hues, assign a different Pantone shade to each filetype, or bedazzle your terminal with ASCII emoticons. The only limit is your imagination (and perhaps the constraints of good taste).

Because at the end of the day, if you‘re going to be spending the majority of your waking hours staring at a screen, you might as well make it a view worth staring at. Your inner unicorn deserves nothing less.

Happy theming, fellow color crusaders! 🦄🌈✨