There’s more to it than just inverting the color scheme from white to black. The way functions, classes, modules, and parts of your code get highlighted can also determine your overall productivity over time. The right color scheme can help you quickly scan and pick up anomalies in your code
Developers have a thing for dark mode. When it comes to productivity, we purposefully dim and change the color scheme of our IDEs and code editors from the standard stark white to an inverted contrast. We do this, in part, to save our eyes from the glaring screen and decrease the potential strain
Here is a list of the Best 7 Visual Studio themes that other developers are using
1. One Dark Pro
Beyond the standard Visual Studio dark mode, One Dark Pro ranks as one of the most installed themes for Visual Studio.
Created by binaryify, it has been downloaded over 91k times and ports Atom’s original iconic One Dark theme over for Visual Studio 2019.
A special feature of One Dark Pro is that the highlighting syntax supports markdown preview – which can come in handy for writing documentation. Markdown is not for everyone and being able to differentiate the different stylings can make life easier.
2. Midnight Spruce Pine
Midnight Spruce Pine is a dark theme that merges the best parts of Tim Macharia’s Pine Gap Dark theme and VS Code Ayu Mirage. It runs on a yellow highlight for methods and a blue theme for variables, functions, and classes. This makes it easy to follow and scan code based on hierarchy and its scoped locations.
3. Atom One Dark Theme
Atom One Dark Theme is another VS Code theme that takes from Atom‘s original One Dark theme. It is an alternative to One Dark Pro and proves to be popular based on the 2.5 million downloads.
4. Goodnight Theme
Goodnight theme is a dark theme for Visual Studio that’s optimized for C#, JSON, XML, and Razor. Methods are highlighted in yellow while arrays are in nicely contrasted aqua green. The most important value in Goodnight Theme are variables, where the contrast between the dark background is at its maximum through white highlighting.
5. Midnight Deep
Midnight Deep is a VS2019 theme for developers that love their dark themes with the maximum contrast effect. The solid black background ensures that this is possible and makes a fantastic theme for low-light situations. If you’re the kind of developer that loves to work through the night or sit under a lot of artificial light, Midnight Deep might just be the Visual Studio theme for you.
6. Night Owl
Night Owl is a nifty little dark theme that’s more than just inverting the colors. The creator of Night Owl made sure to include people with colorblindness and those working in low-light environments into the color scheme consideration.
Wrapping up
When it comes to coding, dark mode is more than just dark mode. It is the thing that makes our code visually easier to track and trace, in addition to making it visually appealing.
Most dark themes follow the same format – highest contrast for the most important pieces of information. Based on the theme creator’s preferences, it can mean the difference between a function and class vs variables and arrays as the highlighted element.