Spent $60 on a dark mode VS Code theme pack and 3 of the themes were basically unusable due to contrast issues

Bought a bundle of 12 premium dark themes for web work, and the dark grays were so close together I couldn't tell code blocks apart, plus one theme had a blue that hurt my eyes after 20 minutes, has anyone else wasted money on theme packs that looked good in screenshots but failed in real use?

2 comments

2 Comments

joseph_west597d ago

Stopped buying those packs after getting burned twice. Now I just grab one or two free themes from the marketplace and tweak them myself. Takes 10 minutes to adjust contrast sliders in the JSON settings. Way cheaper and actually works for your eyes.

webb.stella7d ago

I read a blog post from a developer who said most theme packs just slap a dark background on an existing light theme and call it a day. They tested 15 packs and found 8 of them had contrast ratios below 4.5:1 which is the bare minimum for readability. One theme in my bundle had a lime green on a dark gray that was almost invisible for comments. Another made my code highlight colors so similar I had to squint to see if a function was being called or defined. I stick with free themes like One Dark Pro now and just adjust the contrast in my settings file.