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Bracket Colorization became a native VS Code feature with the August 2021 update, and it replaces the popular "Bracket Pair Colorizer extension" (it's unpublished by now). The reason behind the new native functionality is that the extension suffered from bad performance when colorizing large files (I never noticed that, but hey... 🤷‍♂️).

Colored brackets in VS Code

When I went to my VS Code settings to enable the feature, I couldn't figure out how to configure the bracket colors to match my color theme. Unfortunately, the setting description was not very helpful because it doesn't tell what to put into workbench.colorCustomizations.

VS Code setting: Editor > Bracket Pair Colorization: Enabled (Controls wether bracket pair colorization is enabled or not. Use 'workbench.colorCustomization' to overwrite bracket highlight colors.))

Luckily, I found a tweet by Rachel Leggett that describes how to configure the colors using the editorBracketHighlight.foreground keys.

So here we go with something to copy and paste into your settings.json.

{
  "editor.bracketPairColorization.enabled": true,
  "workbench.colorCustomizations": {
    "editorBracketHighlight.foreground1": "#5caeef",
    "editorBracketHighlight.foreground2": "#dfb976",
    "editorBracketHighlight.foreground3": "#c172d9",
    "editorBracketHighlight.foreground4": "#4fb1bc",
    "editorBracketHighlight.foreground5": "#97c26c",
    "editorBracketHighlight.foreground6": "#abb2c0",
    "editorBracketHighlight.unexpectedBracket.foreground": "#db6165"
  },
}
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About Stefan Judis

Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.

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