When comparing Monokai vs Material Theme, the Slant community recommends Monokai for most people. In the question“What are the best color themes for text editors?” Monokai is ranked 13th while Material Theme is ranked 17th.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Neutral background
Pro The best color scheme in sublime
Pro Good contrast
Pro Easy on the eyes
Pro Improves Sublime Text's user interface
The theme cleans up the interface so that all elements in the UI are easier to find without being distracting. The icons for each file type clearly define what the file is so there's no having to look too closely at file extensions.
The color scheme choices (such as Oceanic Next Dark) in particular work well to distinguish functions, classes, keywords, properties, values, etc. for various languages.
Pro Visually appealing
Pro Full language support
Cons
Con The "neon" feel gets old after a while
Con No contrast between main view and panels
Makes it hard to distinguish what's what at a glance.
Con Developer pushes versions too often
Very little meat in each version. Has been known to dramatically change the color scheme.