How to make Visual Studio Code look like a JetBrains product

Friday. April 01, 2022

Having used IntelliJ, Clion and PyCharm for some time I’m very used to the theme, font and icons so I miss the feel of it when having to use Visual Studio Code. After some experimenting I managed to reach an acceptable look.

The steps I took:

VSCode plugins

There are many Darcula themes in the marketplace and I tried all of them but the one that is the closest to JetBrains and has the widest language support is:

Darcula Theme by Rafael Renan Pacheco

Next the icon package with the most features is:

JetBrains Icons Enhanced by Brennon Denny

Finally an optional plugin(but good everywhere in my opinion):

Better Comments by Aaron Bond

Font

The default font used in JetBrains products is JetBrains Mono and is free and open source available at:

JetBrains Mono Font

Settings

After installing all the .ttf JetBrains Mono fonts I added in the VSCode settings.json:

"editor.fontFamily": "JetBrains Mono, Consolas, Courier New', monospace",
"editor.fontSize": 13,
"editor.lineHeight": 22,
"editor.fontWeight": "300"

In order to have TODO: comments have the same colour as in JetBrains products I added to the settings.json:

"better-comments.tags": [
    {
      "tag": "todo",
      "color": "#A8C023",
      "strikethrough": false,
      "underline": false,
      "backgroundColor": "transparent",
      "bold": false,
      "italic": true
    }
  ]

Finally, for Java users only, in order to disable the underlining of TODO comments:

Firstly I created the file settings.prefs and put it in a folder that made sense:

C:\JavaVsCodeSettings\settings.prefs

Contents of settings.prefs:

org.eclipse.jdt.core.compiler.taskTags=

Last step is to point the VSCode settings.json to this file, so add to settings.json:

"java.settings.url": "C:\\JavaVsCodeSettings\\settings.prefs"

Of course you should change the directory to where you saved your settings.prefs. Remember to escape backslash \ with double \\ if you are a Windows user.

And that’s it!

Comparison in Java project:

IntelliJ: Screenshot

VSCode: Screenshot

Vasilis Vlasopoulos

dev/sec/sre