VS Code theme settings don't adapt to how developers work
VS Code users want different appearance settings by file type, workspace, or editor window, while theme authors and extension developers want more control over styling and theme colors. The signals describe friction from manual switching, settings that can affect collaborators, and workarounds such as hard-coded colors or DevTools edits. Many requests are several years old, so the current state of VS Code should be checked before building.
For VS Code users and theme-extension developers. Mentioned from Feb 2016 to Jan 2026 on Bluesky and GitHub.
12 different people described this problem in 8 separate discussions.
- Indie fit
- 3.0/10
- Pain
- 4.3/10
- Frequency
- 9.3/10
- Willingness to pay
- 0.0/10
- Momentum
- 5.0/10
- Who pays
- Professionals
- Competition
- Medium
- Build difficulty
- Medium
What people said
Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.
is it possible to just set a temporary color (ie. per session / in memory) without creating the .vscode/settings.json in the folder directory?
Currently the extension sets the colors in workspace settings. THis means whatever settings are in that file are then either gitignored or allowed, and then team members will also get your color
Build brief
See what to build and who will buy it
- 1 product idea with the smallest useful version and pricing
- 3 places to find your first customers
- 12 more quotes from people who have this problem
- Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks