Development Tools

Eye comfort is very important, especially to programmers, who spend most of their day looking at code in their favorite editor. This programming productivity tip can significantly improve your coding experience and reduce eye strain during long development sessions.

I’ve already mentioned a few themes I like, and today I am going to teach you how to set your editor up in such away that the theme changes automatically depending on what time of day it is. This developer tools automation can greatly enhance your coding comfort throughout different lighting conditions.

For a long time I have been a big fan of Sarah Drasner’s theme for Visual Studio Code, and even used a port of it in Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition.

Ever since I’ve started learning .Net Framework on both Linux and Windows, I ’ve also started using the default Visual Studio 2019 theme in both the IDE, and the editor. Simply because I like unity across the developer tools I use.

So, as you may or may not know, GitHub is testing themes for its website, and the feature is now in beta according to GitHub Docs.

To change how your GitHub looks, you need to log in to your GitHub account, click your profile pictures, choose Settings > Appearance and on the section that opens, choose one of the three themes that are currently available.

Visual Studio Code (or simply vscode, or even code) is an editor developed by Microsoft. The editor was released back in 2015 and by now is considered one of the best if not the best code editors for web development and software engineering out there. I admit, I used Vim for a bit, but switched back to vscode+vim plugin for better .NET development experience and modern IDE features, since I work with .Net nowadays. This powerful code editor has become essential for programming productivity and developer workflows. I am going to tell you about my favorite set of plugins in one of my next posts.

To be honest with you, as a long time Linux user and open source enthusiast, at first I was hesitant to use a free code editor developed by a company that makes proprietary software. But I gave it a try when a Linux version of it was released, and I have no regrets now. VSCode has become the go-to development environment for programmers across different platforms.