How can I customize the highlighting of matching bracket/brace/parenthesis pairs in VS Code?

by

For future reference, vscode now has the option to change the color of bracket highlighting by adding this to settings.json:

"workbench.colorCustomizations" : {
        "editorBracketMatch.background": "#f008",
        "editorBracketMatch.border": "#f00"
}

Formats supported are #RGB, #RGBA, #RRGGBB, #RRGGBBAA. The rgba(255,255,255,1) format that seems to work in other places in the settings file appears to not work here.

Only feature that is still missing regarding this subject is bracket highlighting when the cursor is between brackets. They only highlight when one of the brackets is selected. I did not find a current solution searching trough the Settings or workbench.colorCustomizations.

Update 2018.04.21
There is now a plugin called Bracket Pair Colorizer that does shows the current brackets besides the line number no matter where the cursor is placed within the brakes. But on slower hardware (3nd generation i5 laptop) i encountered slowdowns with it when editing large files (3000+ line php file). And alternate plugin that performs well on the same file and highlights the current indentation is Guides.

Update 2019.11.10
VSCode 1.40 now highlights the brackets enclosing the cursor.

Update 2021.08.09
as @desilicius mentioned in the comments Bracket Pair colorizer is no longer maintained by the author. He offers as an alternative Blockman – Highlight Nested Code Blocks which has the same functionality but has a totally different look and Highlight Matching Tag which is a great plugin but only works on html (and jsx) tags as the name implies.

Update 2021.08.13
The VSCode team decided to add bracket pair colorization as a built in feature. It is worked on right now with improvements of 10k x the speed of BPC2. The discussion can be found here

Leave a Comment