// the find
johnpapa/vscode-peacock
Subtly change the color of your Visual Studio Code workspace. Ideal when you have multiple VS Code instances, use VS Live Share, or use VS Code's Remote features, and you want to quickly identify your editor.
Peacock is a VS Code extension that colors your editor's title bar, activity bar, and status bar per workspace. It's a purely cosmetic utility aimed at developers who constantly switch between multiple VS Code windows — different projects, remote connections, or Live Share sessions — and need a visual anchor to tell them apart at a glance.
The VS Code Settings Sync integration means your color preferences follow you across machines without any extra setup. The Live Share awareness is genuinely useful: the extension can color the guest's window differently from the host's, which is the exact moment you need this most. The test suite is thorough for a UI extension — separate test suites per feature area (element adjustments, foreground, status bar, etc.) rather than one big file. Color manipulation (darken/lighten) is built in, so you can derive accessible foreground colors automatically rather than hand-picking contrast pairs.
1,150 stars is modest for a utility this broadly applicable, which suggests it never broke through to casual VS Code users who would benefit from it but haven't heard of it. The extension only works inside a workspace folder — open a loose file and Peacock commands don't appear, which is an odd restriction that will confuse new users. There's no way to auto-assign a color on first open based on something deterministic like the folder path hash; you still have to manually pick a color per project, which defeats the low-friction promise for someone with 20 repos. The docs live on GitHub Pages via Docsify, which works but means the search and navigation are slower than a static site generator would produce.