How to make Visual Studio Code prettier in Windows 10

I wanted to make VS Code look prettier in Windows, mostly hide the title bar. That functionality doesn’t exist but I’m mostly okay with the result:

This is fairly easily achievable, and is all done through Windows directly, no hacks involved. Once again, here’s how it looks in Zen mode:

Without further ado, let’s begin.

First you are going to want to turn the menu bar off. This thing:

You can do so by adding the following to your settings.json:

{
  "window.menuBarVisibility": "toggle"
}

I like using toggle there, if you press alt it will open and you can use it. If you want it gone for good, you can do so by setting the option to "hidden" instead of "toggle".

Now we need to change our title bar to match our theme. First we need to know what color we want, so we’re going to need the Menu bar -> Help -> Toggle developer tools, hope you set the menu bar to toggle, otherwise here’s a good reason to do so!

Once we have developer tools open we’re going to click on the element inspector, which is the box with the cursor shown here:

And then use that to inspect and find the color we want, note that you could also do this through digging through your theme’s json file, but I think this is relatively easier. So we should click on the element whose color we want to match. I’d recommend selecting the VS Code file title section:

This element doesn’t reference the background color it uses, but the element right above it does!

Now we go to Windows search (Win key), and type in “colors”:

And we open the Choose your accent color Windows option. In here we’re going to select the “Custom color” option:

And finally, in the open menu we click “More”, and enter our custom color!

Click “Done”, and voila! You have finished. However you might need to restart VS Code to see the changes.

Note: Depending on your color scheme this can and will make your Windows explorer look horrible. Small price to pay, I spend half my day staring at VS Code, and a handful of minutes looking at Windows explorer, I’ll take that tradeoff.