Visual Studio Code for Python Developers Transcripts
Chapter: Exploring the Editor
Lecture: Themes
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0:00
All right, so all this time, Cecil, we've been talking about more what I would describe as like functional extensions, but that's which is great. It helps enhance your developer workflow and improve that type of thing, your productivity and efficiency in Visual Studio Code.
0:14
But let's get to some more of the visual style type of things that we would like to get into, which are theme extensions. That's how you can change the color and styling of Visual Studio Code is through theme extensions. So do you have one that you prefer that you use day in and day out?
0:31
You know, what's funny is I switch my themes all the time. Oh, okay.
0:37
You know, I like dark themes. I like light themes. I'm not one of those folks that like dark themes all the way. Yeah.
0:44
Like, you know, light themes are evil. But, you know, depending on the time of day, you know, you switch your themes up, you know, it's kind of like, you know, switching clothes when you get up in the morning.
0:52
So one of my favorite themes that I use a lot is called Cobalt 2. You know, regardless of whether I'm working late at night or during the day, you know what I mean? I'm a big fan of like how prominent it makes the actual code look, right?
1:07
And I don't feel like the IDE is like getting in my way with distractions. Like, as you can see here, like I'm looking and...
1:13
And you can see how my imports are very much like in my face, right? And the methods we're calling are very much prominent in the code. But I think that's important for me.
1:21
Yeah, I like that. It's definitely one of the ones that I've used in the past. And I'm similar. Like, I tend to fluctuate in which themes I use because, you know, you like changing it up. It feels different. It feels fresh.
1:34
And Cobalt 2 is one of those ones that I put in my rotation as well. And I tend to lean towards darker themes. But in certain situations, like if I'm outside...
1:42
I'd rather have a lighter theme so I can read my screen a bit easier. So I'm not going to show a light theme because I generally, like 90% of the time, I don't.
1:51
But this is Cobalt 2. And if folks didn't catch, the quick way you can switch between themes is bringing up the Command Palette, Control Shift P on Windows and Linux, Command Shift P on Mac.
2:00
And you just type in color theme or just theme and you pick preferences color theme. And then you can actually, for ones that you already have installed, you can cycle through them quickly.
2:08
But if you don't have it installed, you can just search for it. Like, and it would help you in a way.
2:11
And it would help you install it from the marketplace type of thing.
2:14
In any case, the one that I want to talk about is Night Owl. That's one of the ones...
2:18
There's a couple different variations of it, but look at that. Isn't that beautiful? It's just so pleasant on the eyes.
2:23
And I like this one because it's just... The different syntactic styling it does for me stands out a bit better.
2:32
Typically, I'm switching between Python and JavaScript code and this tends to lend itself well in that regard to stand out for certain things.
2:40
For certain keywords in the languages there. And there's the ability to be italicized or not. I generally don't have it italicized. I go like this.
2:50
But you'll notice that, like, depending on the font you're using with Visual Studio Code, which is yet another customization you can do, it will enable you to support italicized themes.
3:01
If your font supports italics, then your theme will pick up on that and enable it as well if the theme supports it. So you need both to go hand in hand in that regard.
3:09
So, just to show the difference of that real quick. Alright, what's your next theme, buddy? Nice. The next theme I have is the GitHub theme.
3:18
Ooh, which one though? There's a bunch.
3:20
Well, so here's the thing. When you install the GitHub theme package, it gives you a lot of different options, which I think is great.
3:27
So you get GitHub dark, GitHub light. So it's a theme that has multiple themes, it has multiple variations.
3:33
Very similar to how you showed the... Whoa! It's so bright! Oh. It's very similar.
3:38
Very similar to how you showed the night hour theme, and there's different variations to night hour. There's also different variations to the GitHub theme as well.
3:45
But one of the things I like about it is it's simplistic, it's minimal. And that's one of the things that's important for me in a theme sometimes, right?
3:53
Like, I just want something simple. I don't want too many things going on. Because at the end of the day, my goal is to, like, focus on the code.
4:00
And like I said earlier, I like to switch back and forth. So, you know, depending on how I'm feeling, I might be using the light theme.
4:07
But if I'm feeling like I'm going to be doing this later at night and I kind of want to dim things down a little bit, I'll switch over to the dark theme.
4:11
So I love having the option of, you know, still staying within, like, the same style, but now I'm just switching back and forth between, like, those different light and dark options.
4:19
Yeah. No, that's cool. I think I like this one the best. It's the GitHub dark default. You got to watch out for those other ones.
4:27
You got to be careful. Those light themes will creep up on you. High contrast is a pretty cool tool.
4:32
All right. One last one before we close things out. It is the Houston theme I want to talk about.
4:36
You can see it's very similar to the ones we were talking about earlier. Again, another dark theme.
4:41
I like that it's a little bit more, like, if I need a little bit more highlighting in terms of the syntax of the code, it's a noticeable difference now.
4:49
And, again, you can even keep these preferences to different profiles within Visual Studio Code, which we talked about in a previous module or previous video.
4:57
And those profiles will isolate those changes. So maybe you have a profile for doing Python development. Maybe you have a profile for doing Node.js.
5:05
Maybe you have a profile for doing Node.js development and so forth. You can have different themes and languages and setup in your Visual Studio Code.
5:12
You capture it all to fit your needs for that workflow that you're going through. Yeah, I agree with you.
5:20
One of the things that I like to do is I'll have certain themes and extensions and just configurations set up for personal projects, for work projects.
5:29
Maybe just change the colors so I know, oh, okay, well, this one belongs to this and this one belongs to the other one.
5:34
So I have a visual indicator of, oh, okay, well, this belongs to a client. This is for work, so this is, like, the serious one, right?
5:41
Like, I need to be careful what I do over here. Yep.
5:44
Well, that about rounds it up, then, for everything that we want to talk about in the extensions and themes video.
5:50
Hope you all enjoyed it and got some good tips out of it.