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My Visual Studio Color Settings

Posted by Keith Elder | Posted in Visual Studio | Posted on 05-03-2010

Several people asked me today what settings I use for Visual Studio after I twittered the following earlier today:

image

Here’s what my environment looks like.  I use a dark theme.  I can’t tell you how important this was for me after I had eye surgery.  Still is, I can’t stand a lot of glare.

image

And here is a web.config file view. Very simple color scheme.

image

If you’d like to try this theme out then download the file below.  Within Visual Studio go to Tools->Import and Export Settings to import.  The changes will be immediate.  Let me know what you think.

UPDATE 3/6/2010

Shawn Wildermuth pointed out that my colors for editing XAML files was horrible.  I don’t edit XAML much and when I opened a XAML file it was as if I was viewing a color scheme designed a 2nd grader.  He was right.  Shawn took my file and updated it and now it is much better. Thanks Shawn!

Thus here is latest version with the XAML fix.

http://keithelder.net/VisualStudioSettings/FontAndColors/DarkElder.zip

  • Alem

    Helo ..  i have  been used  this   with VS 2010 and i like it …  cheers

    / Alem Bristric

  • http://zolpo.com/ Anonymous

    Thank you for this great tutorial.

  • Anonymous

    I don’t see anything wrong with what he’s got, I just switched over. I really like it. Nice work!

  • Anonymous

    thanks for sharing, but I think comments are comments and those should be green!

  • http://keithelder.net/blog/Default.aspx Anonymous

    Tim, thanks, I just updated the file. For some reason IIS was blocking the file now, wasn’t yesterday. Thus I moved it. Should be good now.

  • Anonymous

    The settings file link “on my computer” yields a 404 error. looking forward to trying it out, tho. I always liked dark themes.