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 had to switch to blue theme because in the VS2012 light (default) theme, the light blue used to highlight all the variable names in a method/function is almost identical to the selection. The other themes are incredibly far away from my personal taste.
I would add to the extension the selection of lowercase menu. I can't work with screaming menus and changing the registry on all the machines is pretty boring.
We have projects that are maintained in older versions of solutions for various reasons and having to switch from VS 2008 and 2010 to VS 2012 and back several times a day was a nightmare. Thanks to this extension it is a lot more bearable.
it fixes allot of the problems with the theme but i would like a theme where all the menu and toolbox items don't look the same it takes more time to find stuff than vs 2010 maybe someone can copy 2010 theme
This works wonders. I am used to the VSTS 2010 look and feel and the Blue theme brings back the nostalgia! It would be more of a theme editor if we could have more flexibility in configuring or rather creating our own themes. Or may be it's possible and I need to explore further :-) All-in-all great work!
Wow, thank you. My head almost exploded when I saw "light" and "dark" as the only themes. Out of the box, the vs 2012 themes are pretty horrible. When you have to stare at a screen all day long, it sure helps if it is aesthetically pleasing. Thanks again.
Very nice. Replaces the hideously ugly "Light" theme with the "Blue" theme, which looks a lot like VS 2010. Thanks!
Now if someone can figure out a way to make the menu bar items not be in all caps, I'll be reasonably happy with VS 2012, even though it still doesn't look as nice as VS 2010 did.
FANTASTIC. Just the fact that it has the Dark with light editor made this DL worth it, and the theme customization window is phenomenal! Well, as phenomenal as you can get with the 80,000 options you have. I LOVE the sorting function. I used it to change all the obnoxious highlighted-text blue elements from the dark theme to something not so glaring. Bravo.
Matt, Thanks for correcting at least some of what amounts to an epic design fail! Because of this addin, I have reinstalled VS2012. Hopefully, you are being well compensated for what you've done - you deserve it.
If I produced a UI that looked like the stock themes I'd be eating at Chez Dumpster.
What a life-saver. I've only had time so far to give the themes a quick look over, but so far this looks like it's a winner!
This capability should have been built INTO VS 2012 itself before RTM. Then there wouldn't have been so many complaints about the horrible UI that VS 2012 was released with (& the bad blood that's been created when the request for the return to a 2008-like UI were ignored, apart from MINOR bits of color being returned).
I might even be able to use VS 2012 now. Thanks so much for creating this extension!
Version 2.1 fixes the problems with the earlier version that I mentioned in my previous post, so I am now using this extension.
I'd give it 5 stars instead of 4 if it were a submenu under Tools; however, I'll take whatever I can get at this point compared to the awful out-of-the-box initial defaults.
Whoever came up with the monochrome, all-caps default setting should be fired. Immediately.
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
