visual studio themes Visual Studio Themes

I’ve had Visual Studio ‘themed’ for quite some time now, but after recently setting up my new PC, Visual Studio and all, I only just realized how useful it is. It helps to have a dark background that is easier on your eyes so that you aren’t staring at a bright screen all day long. It is also nice to have numbers, operators, strings, etc. constrast more, especially in C++ where syntax highlighting by default is very basic.

Although I hate Ruby itself, I have always thought the syntax highlighting they use on their website is awesome. So, with the help of the Chrome (or WebKit) developer tools, I extracted the colors I needed and plugged them into Visual Studio. I ended up using the Lucida Console font because it looks nice and smooth from ClearType and differentiates characters well, such as O and 0. I have been extremely happy with the result, and if you have any interest you can download the .vssettings file here.

To use the theme, all you have to do is open Visual Studio, go to the Tools menu, click on Import and Export Settings, select the Import option and then follow the wizard.

If you search around, it’s apparent that a lot of people see the benefit of having a dark colored theme. Including Scott Hanselman who posted an article with several different themes people have created over the years. Many of these themes, including mine, are made for Visual Studio 2005. Fortunately for you, if you use Visual Studio 2008, Tomas Restrepo made an .xslt to convert the .vssettings file to be compatible.

If you’re still craving for themes and have the patience to fiddle with the settings, there is a nice set of themes for TextMate that would make great references. There is also a theme generator worth mentioning by Ryan and Joel Lanciax (brothers?), but I personally never could get desirable results.

Enjoy whatever you come up with! Just know you could spend hours and hours fiddling with different colors. ;)

Update: There is great site called kuler, which was made by Adobe for graphic designers to help create interesting color schemes.