Boost Your Coding Efficiency with Visual Studio’s Rainbow Braces Extension

Recently, C# chief product manager Mads Kristensen released a Visual Studio extension called Rainbow Braces . Its main feature is to display matching curly braces, parentheses, and square brackets in the same color, making it easier for developers to recognize the scope of code pairs.

Rainbow Braces was praised on Twitter for simplifying the understanding of nested code. Similar bracket coloring was already built into Visual Studio Code 1.6 a year ago, and Kristensen wanted the same functionality in Visual Studio 2019/2022.

The extension is published under Kristensen’s name rather than as an official Microsoft add‑on. When ported from VS Code to Visual Studio, the core functionality’s performance improved by about 10,000 times.

Although the feature seems small, it can save a lot of time when scanning code, accurately locate missing or extra braces, and pinpoint the exact spot that breaks compilation. It also helps catch errors such as statements placed outside a for loop that should be inside.

Once experienced, developers rarely want to work without it, especially for brace‑heavy languages like C, C#, JavaScript, and TypeScript.

Another extension, Viasfora , offers similar functionality; its author Tomas Restrepo notes that Viasfora was inspired by an old Vim plugin called Rainbow Parentheses.

Microsoft currently maintains two popular IDEs: Visual Studio, a comprehensive IDE primarily for Windows (with a Mac version), and VS Code, a lightweight, cross‑platform source‑code editor. In practice, VS Code with the right extensions fully supports coding, compiling, unit testing, debugging, and source‑control integration, often matching or exceeding IDE capabilities.

While Visual Studio retains some unique advantages for Windows development, it is increasingly catching up with VS Code’s features. Open‑source editors like VS Code run consistently across platforms, whereas Visual Studio’s Mac version differs significantly and it does not run on Linux.

Microsoft recently released an ARM preview for Visual Studio, adding native support for building and debugging Arm64 applications—something VS Code has long been able to do. Visual Studio runs as a native application, while VS Code is built on JavaScript/TypeScript, making the latter naturally cross‑platform.

Overall, VS Code remains advantageous in size and startup speed.