Bug: Border radius has infected VSCode editor | Hacker News Reader

Bug: Border radius has infected VSCode editor

github.com

80 points2Ucoder51 comments

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...

> I never understood what kind of ergonomics they are supposed to improve.

People like buttons with sharp corners in real things because they are rare and expensive, and buttons with round corners in digital things because they imitate the cheap round buttons that are everywhere.

Now that the round corners have been overused, we may get some fashion of sharp corners again.

I actually like pill-shaped buttons, ever since the times of Sun OpenLook. They pleasantly contrast with rectangular input boxes. It's additionally important because of the wicked flat style where clicky things do not differ from text areas and static elements.

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.

I would call it more of a stain on your career when you use border radius like this.

A stain is a kind of mark :)

It definitely feels that way

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.

> 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.

Some people really get sour when others politely point out grammatical mistakes they've made on a written forum. It's understandable as some people don't really do it tactfully and it can come across abrasive. Then there's a special kind of person who gets sour and snarky over someone politely pointing out grammatical mistakes other people have made.

I for one am glad not having pointy corners threatening to poke me during usage, that's a matter of safety. And aerodynamics. There's a reason why most cars have rounded shapes, we can learn from that.

Who else remembers when devs were complaining about flat design and the loss of corner radii, borders, and gradients? Everything old is new again.

P.S. Code is super late to the game on this UI trend. See Slack redesign circa 2023 https://slack.com/blog/productivity/a-redesigned-slack-built...

P.P.S. I can’t believe I forgot jetbrains did it first.

I came for screenshots and there are none, nor are there in the linked issue this is marked a duplicate of.

https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_129#_modern-ui-prev...

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

Sorry! It seems the page can't be found

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

Sorry! It seems the page can't be found

It broke but it seems back now.

with screenshots that show the border radius

I don't use VS Code, but when I look at the before and after in the video I can hardly tell the difference. I think the "border radius" problem is overwhelmed by the "too much crap on the screen" problem for me to really notice it that much.

Screen shots? Just open the app, it is glaring with border radius.

You want them to install an app and then open it just to see images? That's crazy.

> Just open the app

I'd prefer not to.

Why do you have automatic updates enabled? You should have learned by now that most software gets worse over time. Be selective about what you update

Waterluvian's Law:

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

He says to open VSCode

The following issue has a good number of screenshots in various comments: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/325240?timeline_p...

It looks.. fine? I don't understand why people have to complain about every little thing.

I think the main complaint is why the need to change the UI. I happened with Firefox not long ago. They redesigned the whole thing and the only workaround is installing the Firefox UI fix addon. Same with Reddit. If you are going to make UI changes, make them optional, don't force them to your users

Round Rects Are Everywhere! (Andy Hertzfeld, 1981)

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

Today, even most Apple devices are round rects.

I stopped using vscode because of their ui a long time ago and went to zed. Never going back.

Honestly it is probably time I start using Vim.

Vim is great. But Zed is more like VSCode in usage. And more lightweight too. Not as lightweight as vim tho :)

I had to traverse two symlinks to find it but the vim binary is 4.4MB in size here. It does link 13 libs including the mighty standard C library at 2.1MB.

I suppose I could crank out the compiler and create a stripped static binary for it. Nope, bugger that, I'll drink more wine instead.

My Commodore 64 is glaring at me 8)

If you're serious - I made the jump to nvim a while ago - I highly recommend using vim keybindings in vscode to get used to them/learn them, without having to worry about setting up a viable vim configuration/learn everything at once.

This feels like the effective death of VSCode.

I want to believe this post is sarcastic. But sadly you just can’t be sure…

I'm not being sarcastic. To me, it's a classic signal for the start of the enshittification. These design decision will come top-down from Microsoft.

I am losing karma because of my opinion, but that doesn't make it any less true. After all, you can just observe how the feedback goes against border radius. Hardly it will change back now to edgy corners like it's supposed to be.

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.

So it turns I've been using this new UI for a while and didn't even notice it was different nor did I even know they were doing this update until I saw this very thread full of people complaining about it.

  "workbench.experimental.modernUI": false,

Can't some company just patent those rounded corners?

I don't mind, nor even care, about aesthetics.

But I do very much care about losing useful behaviors. The top-right pixel MUST still be able to register a click on the "Close" [X] button of the title bar, always.

Hide your lack of taste behind rounded corners all you want, but DO NOT change the underlying shape of the invisible event handling surfaces.

The worst thing is when browsers are adding rounded corners to viewport and covering part of website. This is breaking design and in some cases might even hide crucial information.

If they reverted this, it would mean that the people who proposed and implemented this were wrong. They sill never admit defeat, these changes will stay

this bug report looks like a teen complaining?

I'd definitely love to see all Apps using the current native look and feel.

But what is the ask here? straight sharp corners on everything ?

Tangential: who's still using VSCode in 2026?

Everyone who’s using Cursor, Antigravity, Kiro, or Windsurf, to start. And then of course the millions still using VS Code.

I started to use VSCode in 2026. Hardware caught up to it so it's not as slow as I remember (still slow, but fine). It's so noisy. Every cursor move highlights half the screen, at least 3 different searches active at the same time, it's a mess. Can't really write (or read) code in it. Using it for copilot.

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