Why does it matter?
I often discover great new things by looking at other peoples dot configs or seeing what someone has installed while watching a video on YouTube. With that in mind I thought I would write a post sharing some of my favourite themes, fonts and extensions for VS Code. It may not seem important what theme or font you use but if you’re a full time developer you likely spend hours every day staring at code in your editor so anything you can do to make that easier or more enjoyable is a good thing.
Anyway I hope someone who stumbles across this post discovers something new or interesting.
Themes
I only really use two, I think both of them look nice but Dracula uses more muted colours than Monokai Pro so you might find it easier on the eyes, personally I like the spectrum filter on Monokai Pro as it makes the code pop a bit more but it’s worth noting that Monokai Pro is a paid theme.
- Monokai Pro (Filter Spectrum)
- Dracula Official
Alternatively for something a little different check out SynthWave ’84 to get some glowing neon text, I personally think it’s harder to read but it’s interesting.
Fonts
CSS Tricks used to have a great little micro-site for showcasing different coding fonts, unfortunately it’s no longer online but the GitHub repository still exists so you can run it up locally. Note I had to use Yarn instead of NPM to get it running.
Below is a list of some of my favourites, the one I use is MonoLisa, it has good ligature support and is a bit wider than most fonts which I think makes it easier to read and select. Again, however, it is a paid font so you may wish to checkout Cascadia Code or JetBrains Mono which is quite similar.
- MonoLisa
- Cascadia Code
- JetBrains Mono
- Source Code Pro
- Hack
- FiraCode
- Dank Mono
- IBM Plex Mono
- Anonymous Pro
- Gintronic
Extensions
My main note here is that if you’ve not tried GitHub Copilot you should (I wrote a whole post about it). The other thing I think it’s worth mentioning is that the ESLint plugin has an option you can enable to fix on save (which is the whole reason I have it installed).
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