John Papa

Peacock - Late Night Coding FTW

John Papa -

Flashback

A while back I created a theme for VS Code called Winter is Coming. I learned how to do this by reading this great guide on theming in the VS Code docs. I still use it today (I love the dark versions). It taught me a lot about how to customize colors in VS Code. I then started using this to help solve another problem I had: quickly and visually differentiating between VS Code instances

I'm often working on multiple code projects an articles I am writing in markdown. My worflow is to open different separate VS Code instances for each, as they are often unrelated to each other. As my mind shifts between the work, I find myself cycling through the instances and it takes me a bit of time to identify which instance I want to in focus.

About Last Night

I was working on 4 apps at once last night, along with several articles in I am crafting in markdown using VS Code. This motivated me to complete this project

After I had a working extension completed, I created a simple animated gif and shared it on twitter to see if anyone else was interested. Then I went to bed.

I woke up this morning to more positive reactions than from the community (thank you). I also received many great contributions already (thank you again!).

Special credit to the VS Code team and their incredibly helpful guide for creating extensions

Try Peacock Out

If you are interested in trying out Peacock, you can find it here in the marketplace. It is currently in preview, which means there may be dragons ahead.

  • Get the extension here
  • Contribute to GitHub repository here)

Worst case, this extension is just something I'll use, and that's OK. But if you like it too, please give it a try and submit feedback in GitHub. You can open issues or grab an open issue and help contribute.

Thanks!

Cross posted to dev.to