Visual Studio Code is a lightweight yet powerful free-ware source-code editor made by Microsoft. It is very popular among web, mobile, and hardware developers, and one of the best products created by Microsoft.
Believe me, finding a great VS code theme is important. The UI of this code editor supports the selection of the best themes for this text editor. But I haven’t tested all themes available for this tool.
The author of this article has done a great job in creating the list of the best VS Code themes for this text editor. Now, you can choose from many available themes without wasting your time searching for them.
There are a lot of themes for visual studio code that have a significant impact on clarity, maintenance, and speed of coding. Let’s explore the best vscode themes that are popular and trending.
Why Choose Visual Studio Code As A Code Editor?
Firstly, it is very fast.
Visual Studio Code offers support for hundreds of languages, great for day-to-day use, and several advanced features such as auto-indention, IntelliSense code completion, snippets, syntax highlighting, and more.
It is obvious that more code means more debugging and more complexity. Visual Studio Code has an interactive debugger that helps view call stacks, inspect variables, and execute commands in the console.
Built-in support for Git and other scripting tools make developing faster than ever in VS Code. It is suitable for modern web development with rich tooling support for technologies like JSX/React, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, Less, and JSON.
It can be used for a wide range of applications and technologies that include cross-platform web and cloud applications. It offers great flexibility and a customizable environment that help developers to improve edit-build-debug experiences.
We have tried covering top themes for VS Code. If you are using a theme that is not here in this list, you can share via comments below! Also, we would like to hear about your developer experience. Let us know your favorite editor and theme you use that help make you productive.
SynthWave ‘84
This color scheme is influenced by the music and the cover artwork of modern Synthwave bands like FM-84, Timecop 1983, and The Midnight.
One Dark Pro
Atom’s iconic One Dark theme, and one of the most installed themes for VS Code.
One Dark Pro is one of the most downloaded and used themes for VS Code. Developers who prefer dark mode are loving this theme because of its well-blended color schemes and visually pleasing styles.
Dracula
Dracula is a beautiful dark theme for Visual Studio Code. Also, the Dracula theme has an interesting origin story, read it here.
Again, Dracula Official is a dark theme for visual studio code and other 181+ apps. This designer-friendly dark theme is created by Zeno Rocha. Dracula is available everywhere and it is one of the most popular themes ever created.
Shades of Purple
Shades of Purple is a professional theme with hand-picked and bold shades of purple for your VS Code editor and terminal. One of the excellent, most downloaded, and top-rated VS Code themes on the marketplace.
Shades of Purple is one of the most downloaded, top-rated VS Code themes in the marketplace. Its bold shades of purple, markdown editing, and excellent styling improve the developer’s experience and ability to scan code. This theme is a great mix of shades of purple with great feature color highlighting, making it easier for the developers to identify various attributes quickly.
MonoKai Pro:
It is one of the popular and best vscode themes designed by the authors of the original Monokai colors. Carefully selected shades of colors, syntax highlighting, and pixel-perfect file icons of this theme ensure faster coding, non-distractive UI, and a smoother experience.
Monokai Pro is a color scheme, customized user interface theme, and complete icon set for Visual Studio Code. It has been designed by the author of the original Monokai colors. Carefully selected shades of colors are the foundation of an uncompromising, non-distractive user interface. The single goal of Monokai Pro is to let you focus on your code. The icons of Monokai Pro have all been created from scratch to ensure they are easily recognizable on small sizes in the side bar. They are designed to help you quickly find the right files in your project.
Winter Is Coming
This theme was inspired by the themes Visual Studio Dark+, Monokai, and Dustin Sander’s theme for “An Old Hope”. Custom CSS inspired by Wes Bos.
Blue background for the Dark theme was inspired by Sarah Drasner’s Night Owl theme.
Y’all are familiar with this popular dialogue, isn’t it?
This extension, Winter Is Coming Theme adds dark, light, and dark with no italics. This theme is inspired by Visual Studio Dark+, Monokai, And Dustin Sander’s theme for “An Old Hope”. The blue background of this theme is inspired by Sarah Drasner’s Night Owl Theme. It is created by John Papa.
Winter Is Coming Light
Ayu
Ayu is a simple theme with bright colors and comes in three versions — dark, light, and mirage for all-day-long comfortable work.
Ayu is a popular VSCode theme and comes in three versions – dark, light, and mirage. This simple, bright, and elegant theme is appreciated by developers who code for long hours. It is one of the top-rated and most downloaded themes for Visual Studio Code.
Night Owl
Night Owl is a Visual Studio Code theme for the night owls out there. Fine-tuned for those of us who like to code late into the night.
Color choices have taken into consideration what is accessible to people with colorblindness and in low-light circumstances. Decisions were also based on meaningful contrast for reading comprehension and for optimal razzle-dazzle.
Dedicated to Night Owls out there! This theme is suitable for those who prefer coding late at the night. The color choices, background, and styling are chosen perfectly that help in low-light circumstances also. There’s also a Light Owl Theme that is created for easy viewing in daylight. You can disable italics if you wish as there is a no-italics theme also available.
SynthWave ‘84:
Design inspiration can come from anywhere!
This experimental theme is influenced by the music and the cover artwork of modern Synthwave brands like FM-84, Timecop 1983, and The Midnight. This plain CSS theme is a little celebration of 80s aesthetics in modern web development. It enables the 80s neon dreams through glow effect and well-blended colors in the palette, making it one of the classy and elegant themes with a number of installs.
Noctis:
Noctis by Liviu Schera is a collection of light and dark themes with a well-balanced and visually appealing blend of warm and cold colors.
It is designed to be easy on the eyes, hence, reducing eye strain and give semantic meaning to colors used in this theme. There are 8 dark and 3 light versions. With various colors and the best syntax highlighting, this theme has gained good ratings and a number of installs.
Outrun
Outrun is a fully custom theme for VS Code inspired by the colors, style, and culture of the synth-wave music scene. Outrun is available on the Extension Marketplace. Search for Outrun, install, and then set it as your theme! Outrun is a new theme and has not been tested with all languages/editor features. If you come across a weird style or have suggestions for improvements, submit an issue with the information.
Slack Theme for Visual Studio Code
Colour scheme inspired by the Slack default themes.
Eva Theme
Eva Theme is a colourful and semantic colouring code theme meet Visual Studio Code. There are four styles in it: Dark, Dark Bold, Light, Light Bold. The Bold styles make keywords and function names thicker.
Dainty
Dainty is a colour theme generator with support for Visual Studio Code. It comes with default presets Dainty Dark and Dainty Light as well as popular colour themes as its presets. Dainty keeps most of the token colours of the original themes, but the workbench and UI elements such as selections and shadows are rebuilt for a sleek and minimal appearance.
Greenery
Greenery is a dark based theme for people who wish they were in a forest, but still want to read their code.
Rainglow
Rainglow is a collection of colours themes for a number of different editors and platforms. This repository consists of 320+ syntax and UI themes for Visual Studio Code.
Synthwave
This colour scheme is influenced by the music and the cover artwork of modern Synthwave bands like FM-84, Timecop 1983 and The Midnight.
New Moon
New Moon is the optimized dark theme for web development. It has been meticulously designed to be easy on the eyes and intuitive. It’s pleasant for long coding hours in any language, and particularly well suited for HTML, CSS, SCSS/LESS, PHP (WordPress), and JavaScript (React, Vue).
Base2Tone
Base2Tone is thirteen duotone colour schemes which by now are implemented in themes for many applications using templates which can work with the Base16-Builder CLI tool1.
Shades of Purple
A professional theme with hand-picked & bold shades of purple to go along with your VSCode. Reviewed by several designers and 75+ theme versions released to keep it updated. One of the top rated best VSCode themes on VS Code Marketplace.
Henna
Henna is a colour theme inspired by my green-eyed redhead girl. The colors are carefully selected with legibility and people with dyslexia in mind to create an accessible theme for Visual Studio Code.
Snazzy Light
Snazzy Light is a vivid light colour theme. It’s colours are based on Sindre Sorhus’ hyper-snazzy, adapted to a light background. Besides looking decent, the main goal of this theme is to show clear and distinct colours under bright ambient light conditions. This makes it suitable e.g. for train commute with intense sunlight.
Grueling Hare
Grueling Hare is a set of light and dark themes with emphasis on steel with burnt orange accents. It is inspired by the astronaut suits in the Lost in Space reboot TV series. Code is styled intentionally (mostly) bichromatic to make it easier to focus when writing/reading.
Popping and Locking Theme
This theme is designed to have vivid colors to capture youre attension yet be easy on the eyes. Originally based on the color theme VS Dark+, Gruvbox Dark and One Dark but has changed a lot since. It is designed for web languages (HTML, CSS, JS and more).
Universe
A dark theme designed with consistent syntax highlighting, accessible text contrast and distract-free user interface that let you focus on the code. Supports for CSS, Elixir, GraphQL, HTML (Pug), Javascript (Angular, React, Vue.js), JSON, Markdown, Typescript and YAML.
Conclusion
Visual Studio Code is a very popular lightweight and cross-platform alternative to traditional IDEs. It emphasizes speed and efficiency but still offers most of the tools and languages you’d except in a modern IDE. This article will provide you with some of the best themes for Visual Studio Code that will help you create a seamless coding environment. You can get a whole lot from these themes.