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Get Through the Year with These Visual Studio Code Holiday Themes

Just what you need to crawl over the finish line and say goodbye to 2020 with a smile on your face. 🤶

• By David Ramel
• 12/18/2020

Face it, you're just barely holding on right now. How much bad stuff can happen in one year? As you grit your teeth and try to pound out some more code while waiting for 2021 --- a new president, a vaccine, a return to the office(?), a "new normal" -- you need a little push to get your through.

And here it is! A collection of great holiday themes for Visual Studio Code to spruce up your coding environment. Just what you need to crawl over the finish line, slump to the pavement and say goodbye to 2020 with a smile on your face. 🎅

• Festive Editor

  

  AUTHOR: Matt Lacey
  INSTALLS: 21
  RELEASED: 11/18/20
  UPDATED: 11/20/20
  DESCRIPTION: Add festive additions to the editor.

  This is an example extension created as part of an article showing how to get started with Visual Studio extensibility development.

  Get it here

• North Pole

  

  AUTHOR: m-fin
  INSTALLS: 1,080
  RATING: 5 from 2 developers
  RELEASED: 10/18/2019
  UPDATED: 10/19/2019
  DESCRIPTION: A dark VS Code theme to get you in the holiday spirit.

  Feel free to make suggestions or submit a pull request, this is a work in progress and I plan on making more refinements.

  Get it here.

• Christmas Theme

  

  AUTHOR: SATYAM ROY
  INSTALLS: 685
  RATING: 5 from 1 developer
  RELEASED: 11/30/2020
  UPDATED: 11/30/2020
  DESCRIPTION: Nothing ever seems too bad, too hard, or too sad when you've got a Christmas decorations in your Vs-Code Environment.

  Some Christmas tree ornaments do more than glitter and glow, they represent a gift of love given a long time ago.😍

  Get it here

• Merry Christmas

  

  AUTHOR: DankThemes
  INSTALLS: 1,684
  RELEASED: 10/16/2018
  UPDATED: 10/16/2018
  DESCRIPTION: The only Santa approved theme.

  Get it here

• Santa Baby

  

  AUTHOR: Benjamin Hargett
  INSTALLS: 1,014
  RELEASED: 11/13/2018
  UPDATED: 11/13/2018
  DESCRIPTION: Uses Atom One Dark syntax highlighting with a dazzle of christmas charm.

  Enjoy!

  Get it here

• Code Xmas

  

  AUTHOR: BK-Code-Xmas
  INSTALLS: 893
  RATING: 5 from 1 developer
  RELEASED: 11/11/2019
  UPDATED: 11/11/2019
  DESCRIPTION: A Yuletide theme for those of us whose favorite editor needs a little Christmas cheer.

  Enjoy!

  Get it here.

So there you have it -- the best holiday extensions for VS Code (that I could find in a short amount of time trying to publish some kind of end-of-year article before my vacation kicks in).

On the Visual Studio IDE side of things, I found the holiday prebuilt holiday theme offerings to be quite skimpy. So you're basically limited to just manually tweaking color/text and other settings to create your own holiday theme. Tools like the Visual Studio Color Theme Designer can be used for that.

However, Matt Lacey's Festive Editor mentioned above is offered as a VS IDE extension.

Also, Microsoft's Mads Kristensen, probably the most accomplished extension writer on the planet, recently published a video on Writing Visual Studio Extensions with Mads - Holiday Special. It looks like Kristensen developed the Sticky Christmas extension as part of that presentation, which he describes as "A simulation of what happens when you spill cookies and eggnog into your keyboard while coding." He announced it ready for download on Dec. 4, but it also says "coming soon" and I couldn't make it work, so who knows?

I may have to conduct a manual, real-life experiment of my own to find out what happens in that situation, heavy on the eggnog, as I slump over the 2020 finish line. Just a couple more weeks ....

Have you found any of your own cool holiday themes? Please share in the comments section below. (Note: Intro image for article comes from m-fin's North Pole extension page.)