My Visual Studio Color Scheme, Friendly IDE

After reading interesting posts about the fonts and colors in Visual Studio, I gave a try to some of them. Because I work quite a lot with Visual Studio, I realized that it is actually very important for the eyes and for productivity. Unfortunately none of the themes have pleased my IDE concept, low contrast, dark background, pale colours, clear type fonts, and follow metaphors.

I also put some time to design and experiment with some fonts and colours. The themes that I found were to dark for me with very high contrast, and the fonts were glowing. 

This theme is still dark but with pale colours. More importantly it follows the metaphors we used to, so it will be OK when discussing with developers. What I mean? You know greenish parts of your code are always comments, or red parts of SQL code is bad (strings for dynamic SQL), as we all used to from visual studio, SQL or any popular IDEs.

One more thing is that when working with F# some of the color features are not the same as C#. So this theme is prepared with the F# projects in mind as well. Also HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and  XAML are formatted following my colour preference.

For fonts I have used DejaVu font with size 10. If Consolas is your favourite font than, it would be better to put on size 9.

Moreover if you use, ReSharper code refactoring tool it has also some colour highlights for it as well. But it is not a problem if you don’t.


C# – F# Scheme

cs fs 

ASPX – HTML – XML Scheme

aspxhtml  xml

14 Comments

  1. Kyle says:

    After extensive googling, this one wins a place in my VS2005 settings.

  2. Can says:

    Glad you liked it, I like it too :)

  3. Kevin Miller says:

    Taking this one for a spin. So far I like it.

  4. sirrocco says:

    What are the options for coloring javascript .. I just can’t seem to find them :(

  5. Can says:

    It should be working directly. There are no specific options for each language.

  6. Mark says:

    I like your color scheme. It’s the best one that I have found. I only changed a few things… I changed the font to Consolas 14, made the back ground black, and subdued some of the bright colors. Other than that, great! Thank you!

  7. [...] I decided to stick with this one for a while, not in the last place because it has  some settings to make Resharper fit in [...]

  8. indra says:

    i’ve try to change my IDE color scheme, but i feel weird afterward. feels not right :D

  9. tidavis says:

    Thank you so much for putting this together and posting it for the rest of us to enjoy!

  10. Chen says:

    thank you very much!I love it.it’s greate.

  11. cuongvt says:

    ur theme won all others. I’m using yours currently.
    Cool thanks

  12. Pablo says:

    Thanks a lot. very usefull

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