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Bug: Border radius has infected VSCode editor

(github.com)

Round Rects Are Everywhere!

Author: Andy Hertzfeld

Date: May 1981

https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html

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Rounded corners and pill-shaped buttons really infest UI everywhere, and I never understood what kind of ergonomics they are supposed to improve.

And fighting them is increasingly difficult, but at least somewhat possible:

- VSC luckily still supports

    workbench.experimental.modernUI
we can turn off; and if they will be marginally clever, it will remain there indefinitely.

On the web, we can use userstyles sharpening most dulled corners [1]. And if you happen to have seen upcoming Firefox skin, it is also pill addict's fewer dream. We can use userChrome.css, but web components are making it very cumbersome and fragile, basically constantly adding new custom properties, being glad they are really used [2]. But I digress. I really look forward for this pill mania to wear off, like wet floors, glitters, and similar fads.

[1] https://userstyles.world/style/8283/

[2] https://gist.github.com/myfonj/f5415dd0580663a82ea18407ef2ee...

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Lots of unnecessary whitespace, tabs changing colour to be confusing about which is selected…

They hired a new design lead who wants to make their mark, didn't they.

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It definitely feels that way
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I would call it more of a stain on your career when you use border radius like this.
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A stain is a kind of mark :)
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It looks.. fine? I don't understand why people have to complain about every little thing.
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I came for screenshots and there are none, nor are there in the linked issue this is marked a duplicate of.
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Waterluvian's Law:

> The more an article would benefit from photos, the less likely it’ll have them.

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The following issue has a good number of screenshots in various comments: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/325240?timeline_p...
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https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_129#_modern-ui-prev...

At the end of that video you can see the modern UI preview.

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Sorry! It seems the page can't be found
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they seem to have a lot of broken pages, like the changelog :facepalm:

https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_139

Internally, these companies are the real slopocolypse

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Sorry! It seems the page can't be found
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Screen shots? Just open the app, it is glaring with border radius.
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> Just open the app

I'd prefer not to.

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You want them to install an app and then open it just to see images? That's crazy.
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He says to open VSCode
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A gluttonous heaping dollop of border radius has been added to my favorite code editor. It is effecting my coding productivity, as the change is quite harmful to the eyes. The designers have been plaguing the web with this exponentially. It was only a matter of time before it spread to desktop electron apps. That time has come now, I have reported this visual bug to VScode.
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> It is effecting my coding productivity, as the change is quite harmful to the eyes.

You probably mean "affecting". As a verb, "effect" means "to put into effect" or sometimes "to make more effective". Somehow I don't get the sense you meant either of those.

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Phew, thank you, their sentence was utterly incomprehensible without your correction. I couldn't possibly have guessed what they meant. Thanks.
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I stopped using vscode because of their ui a long time ago and went to zed. Never going back.
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I fired up VSCode for the first time in months because I thought it would be a good tool to introduce a friend to LLM-assisted coding. I was so totally overwhelmed by the interface (after using VSCode every day for years!) that I gave up. I've gotten to used to the visual simplicity of Zed + terminal, or often just a terminal.
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Honestly it is probably time I start using Vim.
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Vim is great. But Zed is more like VSCode in usage. And more lightweight too. Not as lightweight as vim tho :)
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This feels like the effective death of VSCode.
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I want to believe this post is sarcastic. But sadly you just can’t be sure…
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Can't some company just patent those rounded corners?
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  "workbench.experimental.modernUI": false,
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Tangential: who's still using VSCode in 2026?
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