Visual Studio Themes

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In this how-to article, we'll customize the Visual Studio color theme from the default blue theme to the dark theme. Then, we'll customize the colors for two different types of text in the code editor.

Visual Studio Themes Reddit

If you haven't already installed Visual Studio, go to the Visual Studio downloads page to install it for free.

Browse other questions tagged visual-studio-2008 or ask your own question. The Overflow Blog Communities are a catalyst for technology development. @KalaJ by default Visual studio 2012 comes with Light or Dark (and latest versions have Blue) Its one of the first settings. Tools / Options / Environment / General / Visual experience / Color theme. There is also an official add-on that expands the number themes.

Resharper Themes. If you have Resharper installed in Visual Studio, It's a good idea to take advantage of the features of customization for your environment with new nice themes for your code. ##Enable colors in Resharper. In Visual Studio, go to Menu Bar, Ressharper Options. In the left panel find Code Inspection Section, and click in Settings. Winter is Coming is a collection of five Visual Studio Code color themes: Light, Dark Blue, Dark Black, Dark Blue No Italics, and Dark Black No Italics. As the five themes come as one package, you need to install all, even if you just want to use one of them. How to change the Pre-Installed Visual Studio 2019 theme. Visual Studio 2019 comes with 4 pre-installed themes they are: Blue, Light, Dark, and Blue with Extra Contrast. In order to change the theme the user needs to open Visual Studio Options Dialog, this can be done in the following two ways given below, and from the Dialog, the user can select the Color Theme of his choice.

If you haven't already installed Visual Studio, go to the Visual Studio downloads page to install it for free.

Set the color theme for the IDE

The default color theme for Visual Studio's user interface is called Blue. Let's change it to Dark.

  1. On the menu bar, which is the row of menus such as File and Edit, choose Tools > Options.

  2. On the Environment > General options page, change the Color theme selection to Dark, and then choose OK.

    The color theme for the entire Visual Studio development environment (IDE) changes to Dark.

Visual studio themes 2020

Tip

You can install additional predefined themes by installing the Visual Studio Color Theme Editor from the Visual Studio Marketplace. After you install this tool, additional color themes appear in the Color theme drop-down list.

Tip

You can create your own themes by installing the Visual Studio Color Theme Designer from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Visual Studio Theme Change

Change text colors in the editor

Now we'll customize some text colors for the editor. First, let's create a new XML file to see the default colors.

  1. From the menu bar, choose File > New > File.

  2. In the New File dialog box, under the General category, choose XML File, and then choose Open.

  3. Paste the following XML below the line that contains <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>.

    Notice that the line numbers are a turquoise-blue color, and the XML attributes (such as id='bk101') are a light blue color. We're going to change the text color for these items.

  4. To open the Options dialog box, choose Tools > Options from the menu bar.

  5. Under Environment, choose the Fonts and Colors category.

    Notice that the text under Show settings for says Text Editor—this is what we want. Expand the drop-down list just to see the extensive list of places where you can customize fonts and text color.

  6. To change the color of the line numbers text, in the Display items list, choose Line Number. In the Item foreground box, choose Olive.

    Some languages have their own specific fonts and colors settings. If you are a C++ developer and you want to change the color used for functions, for example, you can look for C++ Functions in the Display items list.

  7. Before we exit out of the dialog box, let's also change the color of XML attributes. In the Display items list, scroll down to XML Attribute and select it. In the Item foreground box, choose Lime. Choose OK to save our selections and close the dialog box.

    The line numbers are now an olive color, and the XML attributes are a bright, lime green. If you open another file type, such as a C++ or C# code file, you'll see that the line numbers also appear in the olive color.

Visual Studio Themes Extensions

We explored just a couple ways of customizing the colors in Visual Studio. We hope that you'll explore the other customization options in the Options dialog box, to truly make Visual Studio your own.

See also