If there’s one thing the all-pow­er­ful VSCode can’t do - its chang­ing the in­ter­face font. You can change the font of the ed­i­tor (the cod­ing part), but not the rest of the ed­i­tor. It de­faults to your sys­tem font, which is the fancy new Segoe UI Variable for me. However, I am al­ler­gic to any­thing other than Inter, so I looked into chang­ing the font. There must be an ex­ten­sion, right?

There is, but it does it in such a hacky way that VSCode tells me that my VSCode in­stal­la­tion is cor­rupted - and that kinda irks me.

So I looked for an of­fi­cial way. It does­n’t ex­ist ap­par­ently.

The next best thing is to open a GitHub is­sue and sug­gest it. But some­one has to have opened an is­sue on this al­ready, right? I mean, other peo­ple must have wanted this fea­ture too.

Thankfully, there was an is­sue opened. But here’s the catch.

It was opened in 2015. And 9 years later, it is still open.

I’m not sure why it has­n’t been im­ple­mented yet. At the same time, I do not want to make ig­no­rant as­sump­tions about the com­plex­ity of the is­sue - maybe its more than just adding font-family to some part of the code. Whatever the rea­son may be, I de­cided to add my voice to the is­sue.

Fueled by a sin­gle espresso shot and the gen­eral dis­ap­point­ment at the fact that I could­n’t have an aes­thetic VSCode for the forsee­able fu­ture, I made my his­toric name­sake proud with this top-tier shit­post.

Read it on the GitHub thread.

Dear VSCode,

In 2015, I was 9 years old. Young and bliss­fully ig­no­rant of the world out­side. I was a mere 9-year-old kid back then, prob­a­bly still in el­e­men­tary school, dream­ing of the day I’d be old enough to com­plain about things like font choices in code ed­i­tors. I was a mere 9-year-old kid back then, where my biggest con­cern was go­ing back home and watch­ing Transformers episodes on TV.

I am now 18 years old—a full-fledged adult. Over these years, the world has un­der­gone seis­mic shifts: we’ve seen new lead­ers rise and fall, memes come and go, tech­nol­ogy evolve be­yond our wildest imag­i­na­tions, and even weath­ered a global pan­demic.

Meanwhile, my per­sonal jour­ney has been noth­ing short of a tragic epic. I’ve lived through the dark­est re­cesses of ado­les­cence, sur­vived the ex­is­ten­tial crises of my teenage years, and watched as the spark of youth­ful op­ti­mism with­ered into weary res­ig­na­tion. The hopes and dreams of my early child­hood have crum­bled, giv­ing way to a pro­found sense of ex­is­ten­tial dread. I wit­nessed the rise and fall of count­less civ­i­liza­tions with my own eyes. My own per­sonal growth has felt like an end­less cy­cle of try­ing to rein­vent my­self, only to face the cold, in­dif­fer­ent re­al­ity that some things, like this font re­quest, never evolve.

Amid all this tu­mult and trans­for­ma­tion, one con­stant has re­mained un­changed: the un­re­solved re­quest for an in­ter­face font up­date in VSCode. Even when the tides of the world changed, when the ta­bles turned, and the coins flipped; when my par­ents dis­owned me and I turned to an ad­dicted life of video games and StackOverflow threads, this GitHub is­sue was the only thing that stayed strong with me and open through­out all the trau­ma­tiz­ing times.

Here’s to a decade of wait­ing and hop­ing. As the world moves for­ward, let’s not for­get the hum­ble font re­quest that has with­stood the test of time. While every­thing else around us evolved—so­ci­ety, tech­nol­ogy, even my ma­tu­rity level—VS­Code’s per­sis­tence to not add this fea­ture still stays strong in my heart. If my 9-year-old self could wit­ness this touch­ing mo­ment, I’m sure he’d be proud.

Sincerely,
A re­cov­er­ing de­vel­oper

Someone later DMed me ask­ing whether my par­ents ac­tu­ally dis­owned me, to which I would like to in­form my 3 read­ers that no, my par­ents did not dis­own me. They just think I make re­ally bad jokes.

Hopefully some­one on the VSCode dev team gets a laugh out of it, enough to mo­ti­vate them to go back to the is­sue and close it. Or maybe they’ll just close it be­cause they’re tired of peo­ple like me. Who knows?