Ask HN: What colorscheme are you using in your code editor?

23 points by navierstokess ↗ HN
I'm using catppuccin for everything.

78 comments

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I used to customize everything, and usually went with Solarized Dark. But I started using VS Code a couple of years ago, and its dark mode (Dark+) has been really nice. I use it for perl, elixir, and bash.
Um… The default color scheme? Unless some color is not designed to be be readable on my background, in which case I customize it and turn off the colorization for that text category.

I mean, I don’t really care about colors in my editor, but I don’t want to be like those people who get all huffy and turn off all colors just because. But I do need to be able to read the text, so I occasionally change it.

I’m using the Dark+ theme built into VS Code, because I maintain several extensions with syntax highlighting. My priority is that the extensions look good with the defaults, and dogfooding is one way to achieve that.
gruvbox on MacVim, molokai on VimR

I just uninstalled VSCode few days ago...

Loved Monokai in Sublime Text, carried that over with Visual Studio Code.
Same. I love Gruvbox too, but Monokai is included in Code so I went back to that
The default intellij dark theme (darkula I think).

Matches nicely with zenburn on the wm.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=narenran...

I wanted a color scheme where colors _meant_ something, rather than just be pretty - where you can just squint at your code and be able to visualize a heatmap of the key control flows. Among other things Chandrian uses Warm Colors for action keywords, Cold colors for Function names, variable values etc, and muted colors for punctuation / parenthesis etc. which just get in your way of reading code.

Disclaimer: I made it

Been using Monokai for the longest time. Currently alternating between that and Dracula variants.
Time for one maybe folks haven't heard of:

Plastic. It was done by one of the folks originally involved with Atom One Dark:

https://plastictheme.com/

Monokai on JetBrains products (mostly RubyMine).
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Solarized Dark for a long time, then Solarized Light b/c the rest of my windows/themes are all light.

Now it's Dracula, b/c it's fun and widely supported. I still use light themes for everything else.

(I used iTerm + tmux + neovim for coding)

I'm impressed at just how hard it is to see what catppuccin actually looks like in VSCode without installing it first. The catppuccin github has no screenshots, and the catppuccin-for-vscode github/site has exactly one screenshot, which is split into diagonal "bands" for the four different versions of the scheme, and only one of those bands has a significant amount of code.
You can preview it in VSCode. Open command pallete, type "Color Theme", click on top on "Browse additional color themes", and type "catppuccin" in the box. Arrows up/down to preview, Enter to install it.
The catpuccin/vscode repo does have screenshots. They're collapsed under the "Previews" header, so you have to click each of the variants you want to view. Annoying, but they're there.

https://github.com/catppuccin/vscode

I'm colorblind (protanopia), which makes most color schemes unusable in some way. I use the default Visual Studio Code darkmode color theme. It's perfect for my type of colorblindness! The colors have great contrast for me, and I can easily read everything.
It would definitely be nice to see more color schemes targeted at users with color vision issues.

Prot recently developed two emacs themes targeted at users with deuteranopia and tritanopia: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/ef-themes

Big fan of gruvbox dark in vim. I don't normally use dark mode in other contexts but gruvbox is warm without any loud colors.

I used to use an absolutely terrible colorscheme named sakura light or something, anyone I showed my editor to would be blinded lol.

I'm on gruvbox medium. Everything feels clear and readable.
I also use gruvbox dark with hard contrast. I completely forgot I was using it and had to look at my vimrc. That's how good it is: I set it a number of years ago and haven't had to touch it since.
Been using Monokai Pro https://monokai.pro/ for Jetbrains editors and Visual Studio Code for a while now. I still haven't gotten that itch to switch themes.