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.
This is GREAT. Suggestion: can a theme be linked to a solution? Imagine each solution a developer works on would have its own color scheme ... Technically this would just require an extra property in the .sln file referring to that scheme.
PLEASE make one for Office 2013, as soon as possible would be nice. The themes are just horrible. I think you need to fire your artistic designers and hire some real graphic designers.
Somewhere, at Microsoft, is a manager. This person probably has a crisp manner of speaking, excellent posture, and uses bombastic words like "deliverable" and "core competency" and "chime in". And that person is a friggin' idiot. To that idiot: I would like to tell you something that neither your mother, your father, your 1st-grade teacher, your first girlfriend (or boyfriend) (or Metro-friend), your high-school counselor, your college counselor, your grad-school counselor, your trust-fund trustee, your grand-parents, or your dog told you: You are a bona-fide idiot. You live in a world where you can be utterly incompetent, and still stay afloat, because other people around you have been pulling your weight from birth. If you had been born into an environment where latte was a type of weapon, I can assure you: VS2012 WOULD NOT LOOK SO HORRIFIC. NO, I AM NOT YELLING AT YOU. I AM MERELY FOLLOWING YOUR LEAD.
Matt, this is fantastic work! Such a pity MS didn't get you to do this at the beginning, instead of trying to force the new light/dark themes on everyone, whether they wanted the change or not. The light/dark themes would have been so much better received if they had been a choice, not rammed down our throats.
But the problem is, I only found the 2.1 version by accident (but a very pleasant one it was), then again, I only found the updated 2.2 version by accident as well. So much frustration could have been saved for a lot of people, if they knew only about your extension.
One odd thing though, VS didn't flag the new version as an available update, even though I had the original one installed already.
I love the sound of the things that you're "thinking about" doing. Can't wait to see what you come up with.
Biggest disappointment with VS 2012 was them ramming metro down our throats... especially the atrocity that is their default styling of VS 2012. This editor lets me change the environment to look in such a way that doesn't give me a headache within a few minutes. Added bonus: They attempted to match their last VS color scheme as one of the default templates.
Colorless icons remain the same. Let's face it Microsoft. We are not happy with new User Interface. We want to see UI of VS2010. Gray colored icons very bad choice for our eyes. Children can make this icons better than MS. Metro theme is very bad for new generation PCs. Everything is gray. It seems 80's old PCs. Why do we use color monitor? Why do we use new generation graphic cards? Is it for Metro theme or gray screen?
Couldn't have installed this soon enough. Dark and light themes, really? Sometimes is just doesn't make sense to deviate too far from what is already working, right MSFT.
Hi there,
Fantastic extension! I've used the 2010 version for a while now and it's even more useful (arguably essential!) in 2012.
I'm a fan of the dark themes, but would like to change it so the icon colors aren't inverted when using them. Is this currently possible?
I am trying to get rid of the horrendous VS2012 default theme because after 6 months of using it there is no way I can get used to it and I have had enough of staring at my screen trying to work out where to click my mouse. However, all the colour themes here are also horrendous. I got to this download through a blog where it said install the colour theme editor and select the 'blue' theme. There is no blue theme. I don't see the point in having themes which are all practically the same and all awful. How do I get something resembling VS 2010, which was a fine theme and nice to work with?
If you're unable to update to VS 2012 Update 2 for some reason, (newly introduced bugs is my reason) you need to get version 2.2 of the color theme editor. This is the last version to have the Blue theme. You can download version 2.2 from the Internet Archive at the below link since previous versions appear do not appear to be available on this site.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130422182857/http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/366ad100-0003-4c9a-81a8-337d4e7ace05
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
