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 :-)
1) Categorize settings by UI and Code Syntax (Text Editor) settings. The in the editor allow them to filter using those 2 top level categories.
2) Once #1 is implemented it would not be hard to update the import process to allow the user to import the whole theme, just the UI settings or just the Code Syntax (Text Editor settings)
3) Make is easier to change the same setting under a certain category. For example, changing the background for all the Text Editor settings. One possibility would be to allow users to filter what settings show on the editor list. That way I could filter on Text Editor -> background setting and it would only show the different background setting related to the Text Editor. I could then easily select all the ones I want to change.
Overall, this is a great extension and is something the VS2012 team should have included as part of the base application. This should not be something that requires an extension.
One more suggestion, take a look at the following page to create themes for VS2010 (http://studiostyl.es/schemes/create). Some things it has that could improve this extension are:
1) Show example Text Editor window and you can click on different elements and change the foreground/background color. I was able to change the background color of the text editor with this within a couple of minutes.
2) The color editor control is very flexible: use color wheel, enter RGB value or enter hexidecimal. Also, the RGB and hexidecimal values change as you change the color on the wheel.
Seeing an example of the items that can be change and just clicking on them to change the background/foreground is really nice.
I clicked on the download button above and downloaded ColorThemeEditor.vsix and am receiving "The Extension Manifest is Invalid".
How to fix the problem?
I have Visual Studio 2012 Professional installed.
Check your VSIX extension, it is most likely pointing to a previous version of Visual Studio. Fix the extension to point to VSIXInstaller.exe, usually somewhere around <Program Files>\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE
That resolved the issue on one of my computers and will try on the other this evening. Thank you.
Missing fropm the product are two things, one of which is standard Microsoft, sadly.
1. Dark blue editor. The application can be the off black, called Dark. I like that, just takes getting used to. The dark blue editor is missing, though.
2. The ability to select a prebuild theme from a file or to save a color scheme to a file. In tha way, people can share themes or post themes. VS2010 had something like that. I had a dark blue Turo Pascal theme, which I used.
Couple of Questions
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?
How to change the color of these tabs?
They once changed to the green color from the Green theme.
Unfortunately the color does not change any more by selecting a different theme. Creating a new theme does not change it either.
Is this is bug, or do I miss something?
I've got the same issue. It's quite annoying since now it can't read the text in the document tab and don't know which document's i've opened.
I also tried changing themes and creating a custom theme. The color which i set is not applied (even after restarting Visual Studio).
I believe the issue was caused by the last update to visual studio or the theme plugin, i didn't have the issue until recently (max 2 weeks).
Can somebody help? Can somebody at least confirm that the newest stable Visual Studio 2012 update & theme editor do not necessarily result in this issue? In that case i might try reinstalling Visual Studio (and Resharper and and and...)
One thought: do you have the Productivity Power Tools extension installed? Productivity Power Tools has a sub-extension called Custom Document Well which, among other things, color-codes document tabs by project. If this is the problem, you can either turn the Custom Document Well part off (in Tools\Options\Productivity Power Tools) or you can uncheck "Color tabs by project" on the Productivity Power Tools\Custom Document Well options page.
If you don't have Productivity Power Tools, are there any other extensions installed? I'm using the latest VS update on my machine, and I haven't noticed issues.
@Matthew
Thank you. You were completely right. Disabled "Custom Document Well" and everything works again. Updated Productivity Power tools on 15.02.2013.
Thank you again.
Hi is it possible to import my theme from Visual Studio Color Theme Editor (2010) in the future? I checked the file and XML format is different, so I can't import at the moment.
Can not install for Team Explorer:
1. Not visible in Tools -> Extensions and updates...
2. If I download and try to install vsix error displays: 'This extension is not installable on any currently installed products'.
Any time I install an update or any other extension to VS2012, my custom color themes are removed from the list of color themes. I have to totally recreate them. Is there any way to keep this from happening?
The menu items should show up in the Tools menu, near the bottom by Options and Customize. Tools\Customize Colors brings up a launching point for browsing and creating themes. Tools\Change Color Theme\... can be used to quickly switch themes. Let me know if these aren't working for you.
Matthew,
Thanks for the reply. I don't have the "Tools\Customize Colors" menu option. The "Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor" is installed and enabled.
I can not find how to edit the background in:
Toolbar (it has buttons: New, Open, Save, Undo/Redo, etc)
Solution Explorer
Editor
How do i edit those?. I want them in black :|
I did a "devenv /resetuserdata" and now I can see "Code covering colors". :)
Maybe my problem had something to do with having VS2010 on the same computer.
Free
