Have you ever found yourself switching between multiple instances of VS Code, while trying to find which one you were looking for? I often have multiple instances open for coding, writing (like this article), and pretty much everything I do with text. Being able to quickly identify each instance is super helpful.

I used to switch the colors of a few key aspects of VS Code manually so I could differentiate them. I was using this technique at conferences where I presented and found it helpful for the audience so they could identify my code too. I finally decided to automate this. That's where Peacock came from.

One of the key aspects I wanted before releasing v1 was to have a lot of unit tests in place, and to have it hooked into CI. I decided to use Azure DevOps with their YAML option. I am pretty happy with how it turned out. One cool aspect is I am running the tests under Windows, Linux, and macOS for both Node 8 an 10. I'll write more about how this works on Azure DevOps in future posts.

v1 has arrived!

I just released Peacock v1.1.0 over the weekend!

Since I released and announced the preview of Peacock, a lot of folks seemed to like it and several contributed to the extension in OSS.

What Can it Do?

Great question! You can check out the full documentation here. But here is a quick glimpse of the main features.

• Change the color of titlebar, statusbar, and/or activitybar
  • Enter your own color (hex, rgb, hsl, etc)
  • be surprised with a random color
  • Choose the primary color for angular, vue, or react
  • Choose a user-defined color from your Favorites
• Save a color in your Favorites
• Adjust the coloring of affected elements by making them slightly darker or lighter to provide a subtle visual contrast between them

You choose which elements should be colored be checking them in your user settings.

Get Peacock

If you have Peacock and want the update to v1.1.0, VS Code will prompt you soon.

If you are interested in trying out Peacock, you can find it here in the marketplace.

Contribute

Contribute to GitHub repository here

Thanks!