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
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Select Dropdowns, MooTools, and CSS Print

    I know I've harped on this over and over again but it's important to enhance pages for print. You can do some things using simple CSS but today's post features MooTools and jQuery. We'll be taking the options of a SELECT element and generating...

  • By
    Google Font API

    Google recently debuted a new web service called the Font API.  Google's Font API provides developers a means by which they may quickly and painlessly add custom fonts to their website.  Let's take a quick look at the ways by which the Google Font...

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!