How to change the gutter background colour in VS Code?

Question

All the VS Code default themes (and any others that I've seen) have a uniform background color between the main view and the gutter. This makes it really hard to tell if you're at the start of a line (or to click there). Is the cursor at the start of the line here?

This is especially annoying with Python where indentation matters and you can't simply auto-indent a block once your indentation is messed up.

I often find myself pasting a block only to find that I was one space away from the start of the line and the pasted block therefore being offset.

Simply setting the gutter to a light grey background would fix this problem but looking at the default theme files I can't see any settings for the gutter. I've also looked at a theme from the store (Material) which has a few keys relating to gutter colours but changing them did not do anything.

Is there any way to modify the gutter background colour in VS Code?

Update: Version 1.8 of VS Code comes with a new setting to render the line highlight which can help with this when set to 'gutter':

Answer 1

You can change the gutter's background color (or colour) in settings.json. This was added in May.

"workbench.colorCustomizations": {
    "editorGutter.background": "#000000" // your color here
}

or you can add

"editor.rulers": [ 0 ]

This won't change the background but it will add a line between the gutter and the editor.