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
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Implement jQuery’s hover() Method in MooTools

    jQuery offers a quick event shortcut method called hover that accepts two functions that represent mouseover and mouseout actions. Here's how to implement that for MooTools Elements. The MooTools JavaScript We implement hover() which accepts to functions; one will be called on mouseenter and the other...

  • By
    CSS Vertical Center with Flexbox

    I'm 31 years old and feel like I've been in the web development game for centuries.  We knew forever that layouts in CSS were a nightmare and we all considered flexbox our savior.  Whether it turns out that way remains to be seen but flexbox does easily...

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!