Did you know that Chrome gives you a stylesheet you can use to customize the look of your dev tools? I didn’t either until I looked over at my buddy Zach‘s screen and saw him rockin’ a dark color scheme in his dev tools when we were working at a coffee shop a couple weeks ago.

He informed me that you can put custom styles in ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/User\ StyleSheets/Custom.css and these will override the default dev tool styles. Obviously, I spent the next couple hours looking for the perfect color scheme and I finally settled on this Readable Theme. To install it you just drop the theme’s Custom.css over Chrome’s. The theme even has some SCSS you can pull down and tweak to configure the scheme to your liking if you don’t like some of the defaults.

Before and After

Before:

After:

You might think this is a trivial upgrade, but I’ve found that this has actually saved me a fair amount of time. The tweaks to the selected attributes and active selector highlights, updated font styles and guides around the contents of the selected element all make it easier to find what you’re looking and have definitely made me more efficient in the dev tools.

It only takes a couple minutes to install a theme and there are quite a few to pick from, so what are you waiting for?

Update: There are now a number of themes available as Chrome extensions. This is the way I would recommend installing them so that you don’t need to worry about updating the styles all the time.

Source:

resaas.com
masthead.social
about.me