I’m one of those weirdos who experiments with fonts and color schemes and application themes more than I probably should. For the most part, I do actually stick with some sensible defaults, but I keep coming back to it and messing around. Sometimes, this is just a way to procrastinate and avoid real work. But I think there’s a fine line between procrastination and “sharpening the saw.” My eyesight is bad enough at this point that even a small improvement in legibility can help me out a lot.
So this week, for some reason, I got on a “playing with themes” kick again. I’m not even sure what kicked it off. But my focus this week was the Dracula theme. The basic free version is available for quite a few apps! I first started using it with git bash, the version of bash that comes with Git for Windows. That was quite some time ago. Dracula was included with the default themes there, and it was easier on my eyes than any of the other defaults. I’ve seen it included here and there with other apps, but hadn’t paid much attention to it.
But, again, something drew my attention to it this week, and I got curious about the paid Dracula Pro version. It costs $80, which seems like a lot just for a pack of themes, but they throw in some other stuff too. After some dithering, I decided to go ahead and pay for it. I haven’t seen a lot of reviews of it, so I thought I’d write one up here.
I’m not specifically a “dark theme” or a “light theme” guy. I lean more towards light themes, so paying for a pack of mostly dark themes doesn’t really make much sense for me, but I found Dracula to be more usable than most other dark themes, so I thought I’d give the Pro version a try.
After you pay for it, you’re directed to a Gumroad page where you can download a zip file. It’s a big 750 MB file, which surprised me a bit. Most of that space (about 600 GB) is the audiobook version of the creator’s book, 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. I think maybe they should have put that in a separate zip file, but I guess it was simpler this way.
I’ll walk through the contents of the zip file here, with some comments on what I’ve tried so far.
- As mentioned above, there’s a content folder with copies of the ebook and audiobook for 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. The ebook is available in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. EPUB and MOBI versions are included for each. The audiobook is available in English and Portuguese, in MP3 format. I haven’t tried reading/listening to any of it yet, but I did copy the EPUB to my Kobo. I’ll probably compress the MP3s into a single M4B file and copy it over to my iPhone at some point too.
- Next, there’s a design folder, with some info about the color palettes that I guess would be useful if you were designing a theme for a new app and wanted to use the Dracula Pro palette.
- There’s a fonts folder, with five fonts, all of which are already available for free. So it’s useful to have them all together in one place, but it doesn’t add any value really. The fonts are Cascadia Code, Fira Code, Inconsolata, JetBrains Mono, and Victor Mono.
- There’s an icons folder, with custom icons for a bunch of different applications. I don’t see much point in messing around with icons. I guess some people like doing that, but to me, it seems like a lot of work for little gain.
- Then there’s the themes folder, which is basically what you’re paying for. It includes themes for 21 different apps. I’ll get into some details on that below.
- And last is the wallpapers folder. There are a bunch of files here, but they’re all basically the same wallpaper design just in different sizes/resolutions, and with slightly different color combos.
- I should mention that the description of Dracula Pro says that it comes with a “bonus screencast,” but I don’t see that in the zip file, or any reference to it in the email receipt.
- I’d also mention that the description on the website says “Your license covers multiple computers with activation on up to 3 devices.” Based on that wording, I was a little worried that there would be some kind of half-assed activation software included with the package, but there isn’t. (Not that it would even be possible to enforce that for most of this stuff, but I’m glad they didn’t try.)
So that’s a bunch of stuff, and it’s well-organized, but it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth $80 or not.
There are seven variants of the theme, six dark and one light. The main dark theme is called Dracula Pro. The light theme is called Alucard. the rest of the themes are all named after various vampire-adjacent characters (Buffy, Blade, Morbius, etc). It’s cute. So far, I’ve only messed with Dracula Pro and Alucard. The other dark themes seem to be minor variations on the main Dracula Pro theme.
Here’s what I’ve tried out, and what’s worked for me and what hasn’t:
- I’ve applied the Visual Studio Code theme on my home and work computers. It’s distributed as a .VSIX file. (The free Dracula theme is also a .VSIX file, available in the VS Code extension marketplace.) Since the Pro VSIX file isn’t freely available, it’s not in the Marketplace and needs to be installed manually. And it won’t sync between computers like the Marketplace extensions will. So that’s a bit of a pain, but not a big deal. It’s working well for me, and I think I’ve going to stick with it.
- There are no themes in the pack for the regular Visual Studio product, which was a bit of a disappointment. The free Dracula theme is available in the VS Marketplace (here), so I’m not sure why they didn’t create a variant for the paid theme. Honestly, though, for VS 2026, the “Cool Breeze” theme (one of the included default themes) seems to work really well for me, so I’m sticking with that anyway.
- On my Mac, I tried the Dracula Pro and Alucard themes for the Mac Terminal app. Both are fine, but I don’t do that much work in Terminal on the Mac, and was happy enough with the default theme.
- For Windows Terminal, I imported the Dracula Pro theme, and I’ve decided to use that as my new default for git bash and Ubuntu tabs, but I’m leaving the PowerShell default as-is (the “Campbell” theme), since I think Dracula Pro doesn’t work as well with PowerShell.
- I tried Dracula Pro and Alucard in Notepad++, but have had some issues there. I won’t get into details here, but I might not bother going further with that. (Or I might, if I get bored and want to mess around with XML files for a while…)
- There’s not much else in the way of themes that I want to try. My main text editing environments at this point are Visual Studio, VS Code, Notepad++, and Dynamics AX 2012, which isn’t customizable at all. Terminal windows, for me, are mostly through Windows Terminal and sometimes Mac Terminal.app. So this is covering most of my bases.
As to fonts, I’ve been reviewing my font settings too, and for now, I’m trying to standardize on Cascadia Code. I was already using that for a lot of stuff anyway.
So that’s my review of Dracula Pro. Was it worth $80? Is it that much better than the free version? I don’t know. But it was a good opportunity to review all of my font and color settings and try to make things a little better, so I don’t regret it.