Colorized Brackets for IDE

By  on  

Coders treat their text editors and IDE's like fragile beings, and for good reason: we spend a ton of time in them and having our tweaks and extensions can make us incredibly productive for our personal workflows. I always love hearing about what extensions and workflows other developers use to see if I can put them to my own use.

That's why @Souvir may have changed my life with this tweet:

I have never put much thought into brackets but I've been using the Bracket Pair Colorizer extension in VSCode for a few days now and I'll never go without it. Those of use who work regularly with the mess that JSX can create will appreciate this extension even more!

Regardless of text editor or IDE you use, give a bracket colorizer extension a try -- if may help you to identify your blocks more quickly!

Recent Features

  • By
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

  • By
    MooTools PulseFade Plugin

    I was recently driven to create a MooTools plugin that would take an element and fade it to a min from a max for a given number of times. Here's the result of my Moo-foolery. The MooTools JavaScript Options of the class include: min: (defaults to .5) the...

Discussion

  1. I love VSCode and actually built one of the top five themes on the marketplace (called Shades of Purple) — but having multi-colored brackets just messes with my head lol. It makes the syntax look weird.

    Don’t get me wrong, I get that it helps but this is a bit out there for me having such a weird colorful syntax. What are your thoughts on that?

    Looking forward, peace! ✌️

  2. BryanYang

    it’s exactly a nice tool.

  3. There is actually a version 2 available.
    https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=CoenraadS.bracket-pair-colorizer-2

    And if you use it in combination with Solarized Light you may be interested in these color settings for it:
    https://twitter.com/daKmoR/status/1084509886048804866

  4. Alex

    The default colors won’t look as nice if you’re using a light theme on a dim screen.
    Still over 3M downloads and this is the first time I head about this extension.

  5. Erez

    Holy hell… mind = blown! This was probably the most helpful blogpost I have read in a while

  6. Has anybody come across something similar for Brackets or Coda?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!