Finding a Theme in VS Code

00:00 Changing the color theme is a great way of changing the visual impression that your code editor has. In VS Code, you can work with color themes that are already included, so you don’t need to download anything or go to a website.

00:15 The only thing you need to do to try out a new color theme is to go to your command palette or press Command + Shift + P if you are on Mac or Control + Shift + P if you’re on Windows, and then type “theme”. With the fuzzy search of the command palette you will see the color theme preferences menu item.

00:39 Once you hit Enter, you get a list of color themes that are currently installed in your Visual Studio Code editor. If you’ve downloaded another theme at some point in your life, it shows up there as well.

00:51 If you just installed VS Code, then you see the standard color themes and then you can use the up and down arrows to traverse through the themes and see a preview right away.

01:04 That’s pretty cool to find out which theme you like.

01:10 On the top there are the light themes,

01:13 and on the bottom you see the dark themes.

01:16 Once you found the color theme you like, you can hit Enter, and VS Code saves this color theme as your color theme. If you want to verify that VS Code really saved your color theme, you can go to your profile settings by clicking on the little icon on the lower left or lower right, depending on your settings. For you there might be a gear icon, I have a smiley because that’s the icon of my profile, and when I click there and go to Settings, and then in the settings search for theme.

01:51 Then you can see there is the Workbench: Color Theme, Solarized Dark. That’s the one that I just selected in the command palette menu. You can also click the little icon on the upper right with the arrow to open your settings JSON file. There you can see a bunch of other settings that I have set and also the “workbench.

02:14 colorTheme” option. That’s an important property here in our settings and we’ll probably come back to this later. I just wanted to show you this to see where the color theme is actually stored in your settings.