Allows users to create and edit Visual Studio themes. Themes can customize colors used for menus, toolbars, tabs, titlebars, the text editor, and other environment colors.
I have bad eyes and found the VS2012 visual theme somewhat harder to look at than previous versions. This package gave me the flexibility to modify the theme back in time, to something more colorful and familiar. This is a great package. My greatful thanks to whomever is responsible.
I downloaded this specifically to get the Blue theme (the VS 2010 look), but it doesn't have it. Please include the Blue theme with this and put a link where I can import the Blue theme.
Great tool. The default colours of VS2012 were depressing.
This and the registry change to get rid of the shouting menus made VS2012 acceptable. Now if you could only get rid of those awful looking icons. I tried the icon patcher but it doesn't restore all of the origional icons and a mixed icon set is even worse then the new icons.
A must-have tool, the default VS2012 theme is too bright for everyday use. Please, could anyone share with me his Blue theme? I installed the update today, and suddenly 'Blue' disappeared from the list of available themes... :'(
I'm using Express version of VS12 and wish this was available for it as the available Light and Dark themes are so bad, that it makes using VS12 a horrible experience. VS10 is a much, much better IDE in this respect. Why did MS ruin the visual theme, and then give no option to change the appearance? I love VS10, and don't even want to use VS12 as it is so completely horrendous! What the deuce? What were they thinking? It's supposed to be Visual Studio!, but everything visually about it is terrible!! It's hard to even tell the what the icons specify....
The editor is very helpful. The fact that the VS2012 UI was changed so much and so poorly with such limited built in control reflects badly on MSFT and the VS team.
Does what it says on the tin. It really helps to reduce the ugliness of VS 2012. Next is to fix the ALL CAPS shouting, round off the square edges, redesign a curved icon, and we will be getting a lot closer to VS 2010 :-)
One of the main reasons I wanted the Color Theme Editor was to tone down the glare from "pure white" window backgrounds, but I can't find any references to "Solution Explorer", "Server Explorer", etc., or even "background".
There are too my #FFFFFF's for me to experiment with them individually.
On my system, with VS2012 / Update 2, and with my "custom" copy of the "Green" theme:
• Solution Explorer: White background
• Server Explorer: White background
• "Installed Themes" of the theme editor: White background
• Class view (an exception): Control Panel window background color
Of course I'd GREATLY prefer most of these windows to simply honor the Windows "Control Panel" color (in my case, RGB 192,220,192 / money green), but failing that, I was was hoping that the Color Theme Editor would let me tone down the FFFFFF's to something less aggressive.
Thanks for making the CTE extension available!
P.S. I shouldn't have written that I couldn't find any "background", just not any background to the windows in question.
I's still really like to tone down the colors. I'll check back again in a few weeks.
Try these:
Environment → Window
This controls the background of many windows, including Class View, Object Browser, Error List, and others.
TreeView → Background
This controls Solution Explorer, Server Explorer, and the per-theme editing page
Environment → StartPageTabBackgroundBegin
Environment → StartPageTabBackgroundEnd
These two affect the background of the content portion of Color Themes page (and the Start Page).
There are some "Text" colors that go with each of these--you can update these as well, if you need to change the default text.
I thought that one of the most valuable aspects of the 2010 theme chooser was its isolation to the current vs session. It was easy to have several projects running and differentiate between them by giving them different themes. This version seems to globally change themes so you can't do that - is it something you can change?
This is unfortunately a behavior built into the way VS 2012 deals with themes. Themes immediately save in the registry and broadcast a notification that other Visual Studio instances are listening to.
The only way currently to create isolation is by running VS with a different /rootsuffix prefix. For example, you can run "devenv /rootsuffix Green" to create a completely isolated environment for everything (including themes). The downside, of course, is that every VS feature is isolated in this context, not just themes.
Here's a suggestion I'd like to see: sometimes I'll be working in Visual Studio and see a color that I'd like to change. It can be hard to figure out what the name of the item is so I can then change the color. What I'd like to do is go into some "find this color" mode where the theme editor uses the color at the current mouse location and shows all of the theme items that are set to that color.
I'm using a dark background theme and the default background color for tracepoints makes them unreadable. However, in the theme editor it only lets me change foreground colors for tracepoints, not background colors. Looking at the Fonts & Colors editor, it would appear that tracepoints don't have a background color at all, even though breakpoints do.
Is there any way to add a background color for tracepoints? Or is that going to require an update to Visual Studio?
With the latest release, this should now be supported. You can now
1. Create a new theme based on the existing theme you want as the starting point
2. Import color customizations from a .vssettings file
3. While editing the theme, use the new toolbar button "Import Fonts and Colors Customizations", which should present you with a summary of all of the customized colors that will imported into the theme.
This way you can now bundle .vssettings color customizations created elsewhere as part of a theme.
Hi there. In standard Dark Theme, the Issues grid in the Pending Changes window is White-on-almost-White for non-selected rows. i.e. invisible until you select the row. Does anyone know which color theme setting corresponds to this behavior? I love the Dark Theme, but it's only this one setting that I would like to change. Thanks for the extension!
1) Is there any site like http://studiostyl.es/ that was created for posting shared VS2010 themes for themes created with this extension? I really would like to get my editor to have the "Humane Studio" color scheme. It would look good in the "Tan Theme"
2) I would like to update the background color of the text editor, is there an easy way to update all the background settings for the Text Editor without doing all of them individually?
3) From what I have read all the theme settings are stored in the registry, is that correct? So to back a custom theme up you would have to export the theme, the same way you would if you wanted to share it, correct?
I would like to know about 2) - I am using a customized dark theme and would really like to change Text Editor background colour from dark gray to black - what is the easiest way to do so?
Thanks in advance.
1) I'm not aware of a site like this yet, sorry!
2) Text Editor → Plain Text → Background is the main text editor background color. Other editor-based tool windows have their own background, if you search for "plain text background" you should be able to quickly edit them all. There may be a handful of other colors that you think of as background colors (for example, Text Editor → Indicator Margin → Background is the background for the "breakpoint" margin). I don't have an exhaustive list, unfortunately.
3) The safest way to back up your themes is to export them and them save them yourself, as you would to share them. While installed, themes are stored in the registry as well as being stored as a part of an installed VS extension (that's stored in the filesystem in your %localappdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Extensions folder by Visual Studio's Extensions and Updates manager).
You can delete each custom theme (there's an "X" icon on each theme in the Customize Colors page--this would restore you back to the default list. Is this what you're asking for? You can also uninstall each custom theme individually from the Extensions and Updates page, which should have the same effect.
Free
