New GitHub themes for VS Code | Hacker News Reader

New GitHub themes for VS Code

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It'd be so helpful to show some examples/images of the various themes without having to install them locally to browse. The image in the announcement leaves a lot to be desired.

https://imgur.com/a/nAXttun screenshots of all the github themes, plus the one I use (one dark pro).

https://vscodethemes.com/

I wish themes showcased C#/C++ examples or basically any other languages besides JS/HTML/CSS combo... Every time I see a theme I'd like to try I proceed to install it, open up a file in both of the aforementioned languages and then I uninstall the theme due to some obvious things missing. For example in C++ very few themes highlight namespaces and their members in different colors. It's a damn shame really.

Hmm, it's an Electron app, so it could be cool to be able to click a button on a theme site which launches an instance of VS Code with an already-applied theme, similar to Theia[1].

Of course, I'm sure this would take longer than it sounds like it would.

[1] https://theia-ide.org/

Dark themes are very popular, and it makes sense as they look so cool. I would still encourage anyone to try light themes out, the fatigue you experience is notably less. I made the switch a while ago and really noticed how less tired I felt after a days work.

I keep hearing people say this, but after years and years of working as an amateur or as a remote web developer, from my home, in the dark, using dark themes whenever possible... moving to a brightly-lit office job where much of the required software is lacking a "dark theme" has got me to the point where I find my eyes typically burning up after around 2–3 o'clock. when I work on side projects at home after work or on the weekends, I never experience any of this, using dark-themed software in a dim or darkened home office.

Using a light theme, when working at day and a dark theme, when working at night works best for me, I found.

macOS can switch it‘s theme automatically, depending on the time of the day.

Some editors, like TextMate, support automatically changing their theme accordingly.

If you use it: George Nachman, creator of iTerm, announced it will also be able to switch its theme in that manner.

I'm sure other shells and editors support this feature too or will be.

VS Code supports this automatically (https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_42#_auto-switch-the...):

"workbench.preferredLightColorTheme": "GitHub Light Default",

"workbench.preferredDarkColorTheme": "GitHub Dark Default",

iTerm already lets you do this via the scripting API. Sublime Text 4 just added it natively, prior to this I had a script that would edit the preferences file, which the app watches for changes.

I really prefer light, but light theme makers always make them painfully low-contrast (I'm not 16 years old anymore, I can't read that) and, less importantly, have this horrible habit of making comments appear "greyed out" rather than emphasized (but if it were just that it would not be too hard for me to edit an otherwise good theme).

Yes, this. It’s quite frustrating. This is why I still usually prefer VS Code’s default Light or Light+ themes. They’re a rare breed in terms of having sensible contrast.

This is one of my complaints about light themes too. The previous GitHub light theme has decent contrast and is what I’ve used when using a light theme.

I've been working outside quite a bit recently, and light themes are a lot easier to see with the brightness and glare. I don't mind when I "forget" to switch back to dark themes when I come inside.

I need a good Dracula Light theme.

It would be interesting to see some way to “auto-switch” the themes for when you’re inside and outside, using display brightness or light sensors.

Maybe these two can work together to do that on macOS:

https://github.com/insidegui/DarkModeBuddy

https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_42#_auto-switch-the...

You should pitch that to Zeno Rocha. He already made the variants in Dracula Pro, he could rename the current Blade them to something else and call the light theme, Daywalker.

https://github.com/Armin2208/Windows-Auto-Night-Mode

I've recently started making use of this app. Since websites and applications are starting to read the Windows dark / light mode setting (VSCode included), my desktop switches dark mode on automatically for many apps and websites in addition to the blue light filter.

Some apps aren't perfect and may need a restart like MS Outlook, but many others work well.

I can't remember the last time I tried a light theme in VS code. But I will have to give them another chance.

Does programming at day/night factor in what sort of theme you prefer?

Interesting, considering they don't talk about atom (https://github.com/atom) at all lately. Maybe they would stop developing it and contribute to VSCode instead? Is there anything atom has over VSCode?

Atom isn't really being developed anymore, as this 1 year window shows:

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind...

In the last year, there were only 73 contributors with the vast majority of contributors making very small changes.

Compare this to vscode:

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?r=gith...

with 389 contributors with over 20 contributors working on it pretty much full time.

Treesitter[0] maybe? Although that may also be built into VS Code too, I've just never seen it mentioned anywhere.

0. https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter

Treesitter is used heavily behind the scenes at GitHub for things like their secrets scanning and other code analysis.

VSCode uses extensions to do language parsing and you can fairly easily use TreeSitter in a VSCode language extension. I have done and it works very well.

Love the github dark themes. Used to roll with my own theme, customized from 'Made of Code' theme from the wild days of typing out raw code with just Vim.

It's amazing what they have managed to create with web-based technologies, vscode is the best developer experience I've experienced, it feels like just editing text but with more power than I could ask for. In a good way reminds of the classical Borland Turbo-C environments, or like working in Linux in pure text mode.

as a die-hard vim user, what feature of vscode would shatter my world?

For me, one of the main reasons was the difficulty of setting a debugger inside vim, stepping lines and inspecting data. In vscode debugging just works once you've set it up.

Also intellisense is just so much better than any of the things I've used with Vim, like YouCompleteMe or whatever other autocompletion sets you have.

Don't get me wrong, Vim is still amazing when setup correctly, but definitely these two things I have not been able to get working with Vim ever properly.

This. Im waiting for someone to change my mind. I used vscode for a year and got fedup with the slugishness of it, went to vim and never came back.

To open up a bit the topic, I’ve been using the Nord theme for a few years now. Looks amazing. Available for most code editors and terminals.

https://www.nordtheme.com

I do like the palette by itself, but not as an editor theme. There is so little contrast and it is too bright.

Yes I agree with you. The various tokens all blend together and it's difficult to pick out the differences. They are pleasing colours though. https://imgur.com/a/j6r8iXN

If you configure Nord to have a darker background the colours definitely stand out better. There are quite a few config options to play with.

https://www.nordtheme.com/docs/ports/vim/configuration

I've always been a big Monokai fan. Usually Monokai Night now. I did try out this theme recently and really enjoyed it with the caveat that my @emotion/core CSS template literals weren't being highlighted correctly.

I notice some themes have more robust syntax highlighting out of the box. Is that something I can tweak easily?

Too much blue in the background

Most vscode themes for me are hard to use as they don‘t highlight the areas enough. Example: I’m not able to see where the line starts as the code collapse arrow background color is the same as the editor... or the left menu is not highlighting enough the current one.

So I notice that I need more/better visual color differentiators so I changed a lot of colors. Has anyone the same issue?

Yes. But it's relatively easy to fix it, you can add an entry in settings with color overrides for any combo of theme/UI element...

Yes I know. This is what I meant with „so I changed the colors“.

But anyway: I wonder why most themes are so badly colored so that I need to fix it myself....

I'm not sure, but my guess is that almost all themes are attempts by developers, not people versed in color theory or knowledgable about proper contrast etc.

Honestly I'm still surprised GitHub didn't adopt One Dark as their official dark syntax theme considering they originally created it.

Soon with LinkedIn integration!

You're probably "sort of but not really joking", but I mean it would be on-brand to see them dropping a LinkedIn/Github integration.

Show employers and recruiters how much unpaid work you do!.

So they can trick you into doing more!

I really hope not.

Nice! I liked the GH dark theme, but I’m really digging the dark dimmed theme since it released recently.

I use Alabaster for light [0] and New Moon for dark [1] in VS Code, looking forward to trying the dark dimmed theme!

[0] https://github.com/tonsky/vscode-theme-alabaster

[1] https://github.com/taniarascia/new-moon-vscode

What about stack overflow inside VS Code ? Is it a good idea ?

Everyday we come a little bit closer to automatically pushing the top rated stackoverflow post's answer directly into production. Truly, we are optimizing the development experience.

https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import

Discussed here too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12868946

Pornhub would be better.

Translated to ASCII art

Really nice to see official releases of this. I made a Typora theme [1], a WYSIWYG Markdown editor, that matches the new GitHub Dark color palette.

[1]: https://github.com/kinoute/typora-github-night-theme

You have to install GitHub Theme parent package that then installs 5 different themes. Why on earth area each of the GitHub themes not available stand alone?! I just want one!

Any one ported the "Github Theme Default" to vim?? I really liked the Default One.

Why are people using this editor? It is unclear what data is being sent to Microsoft:

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/47284

There are many other and better editors.

It’s actually very clear and very easy to opt out.

Telemetry is a good thing which is why vscode is currently the top editor in the world today.

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