Prabir's Blog

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My Visual Studio Theme

May 22
by prabir 22. May 2009 23:03

Ever wanted to work more on your code, but you eyes wouldn’t let you do so? Well, the cure to your problem is – change your Visual Studio Theme. Visual Studio is one of the most pluggable software ever than you can see. You can almost do anything with it. One of the most important one is its theme.

I used to wonder why Windows Vista shifted in black theme as the default. Well black color or basically dark colors can really save your eyes, its been scientifically proven. Old DOS with its black background and white foreground is more human friendly than the present day OS. Not only that, if you are a CRT user, you will know that the black pixel can save lot of power (LCD has negligible amount of power difference due to its nature).

Below is the screenshot of my Visual Studio in Black theme hope you will like it. Its actually a slight modification to the original ghost rider theme which can be downloaded from here. It adds better color support for XAML and snippets like the ones in for-each.

image

It seems to work totally well with visual studio 2008 but seems to have a problem with visual studio 2010 beta 1 due to a bug. I have already posted the bug to Microsoft Connect. Hope they solve it soon. (Even others seems to be having problems with their own themes. Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 doesn’t tend to remember the background color so always resets to white when it is restarted.)   This bug has been fixed. For more info please read my Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Theme Patch post to learn how to fix it.

Note: The font used is Consolas which comes preinstalled with Windows Vista and up. But incase you want to use it for your Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or others you can either download from below or from the official Microsoft link over here.

Click here to download the theme

CurrentSettings.vssettings (252.68 kb) [Downloads: 1020] (Right Click and Save Target As …)

Consolas Font Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or 2008.exe (4.33 mb) [Downloads: 756]

This same theme for Eclipse IDE can be downloaded from http://blog.prabir.me/post/Dark-Eclipse-Theme.aspx.

[UPDATE]

An updated version for Visual Studio 2010 can be found at http://blog.prabir.me/post/My-Dark-Visual-Studio-Theme-Update.aspx or directly downloaded at Prabir.vssettings (209.98 kb) [For VS2010] [Downloads: 389] (Right click and Save Target As ...)

[UPDATE 2]

Due to the popularity. I moved moved the themes to be in source control, which can be found at http://gitorious.org/themes. If any one of you would like to contribute your own theme or extend my dark theme please post it in the comment below. My dark themes for various IDEs and text editors can be download from http://www.ohloh.net/p/themes/download


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Comments

5/23/2009 1:07:05 AM #

Jason Short

That color looks gray to me.  The light green and gray are actually a bad combination for your eyes, the boundary definition is not high enough.  Black and that green would be fine though.

And yes, I have been running black backgrounds in Visual Studio since Visual C++ 4 (color theming was new then!).

Jason Short United States

5/23/2009 3:59:51 PM #

Prabir

Well, thanks for the coment. I did try to play around with the colors. and Found that gray is better than pure white. Green mite have been a bit contrasting, if it had replaced the gray. Mite be I'm already used to using it for a quite long time, so find it quite hard to adjust. Even the default vstheme is quite difficult for me to use nowdays.

Prabir Nepal

5/23/2009 10:08:54 PM #

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Dark Visual Studio Theme

Thank you for submitting this cool story - Trackback from DotNetShoutout

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6/5/2009 6:54:05 PM #

Joe Krahn

Dark-colored pixels do not save any power on an LCD display. Dark pixels only block the back-light, which is a constant brightness for the whole screen, and therefore must be at least as bright as the brightest single pixel.

Eventually, monitors will only use energy for bright pixels, which is how OLED works. I don't know whether the LED/LCD displays work this way.

Joe Krahn United States

6/7/2009 1:20:21 PM #

Prabir

Thanks Joe for your comments.
Actually it should have been CRT and not LCD. ( I had read some article long time back when I was a CRT user on how black color can save energy. Might be this led to my confusion.)I have corrected it in the post.
Anyways CRT saves more power on black while in LCD it consumes more power.

I also did bump into this article which explains more in details, and also has a real life experiment on the energy comsumption details. http://www.seanmichaelragan.com/html/[2009-03-26]_Power_use_of_white_vs_black_screens_in_LCDs_and_CRTs.shtml

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8/26/2009 2:22:25 PM #

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Hi,

Microsoft Visual Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It can be used to develop console and graphical user interface applications along with Windows Forms applications, web sites, web applications, and web services in both native code together with managed code for all platforms supported by Microsoft Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows CE, .NET Framework, .NET Compact Framework and Microsoft Silverlight.

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9/15/2009 11:05:31 AM #

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HI,
   Why do people need to download .NET Framework in order to use applications made in Microsoft Visual Studio?

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9/16/2009 10:03:39 PM #

prabirshrestha

well .net framework is like the runtime and its a virtual stack based machine similar to java virtual machine.
its quite a huge story on why but i would recommend you to read article on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.net_framework mite be a good starting point.
luckily nowdays, .net framework get distributed with windows so that would be a bonus, but still do keep in mind the .net version installed in various windows.

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9/22/2009 4:17:46 PM #

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9/22/2009 8:45:34 PM #

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haha. i should have come up with better title though...

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10/26/2009 4:29:29 PM #

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Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, would you mind updating your blog with more information? It is extremely helpful and beneficial to your readers.

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10/26/2009 8:31:15 PM #

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Now that I got a more relaxed schedules I will be writing up articles frequently.

thanks to all for the cheers!

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11/8/2009 5:27:38 PM #

prabirshrestha

sure, u can translate to your own language. sharing knowledge is one of the greatest thing a man can do.

besides there r some translators at the right side - microsoft translator and google translators. though they may not be so accurate as human.

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11/14/2009 10:31:55 AM #

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11/17/2009 7:15:47 PM #

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Just updated the dark theme for better Visual Studio 2010 support. You can read more at blog.prabir.me/.../...ual-Studio-Theme-Update.aspx

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some article long time back when I was a CRT user on how black color can save energy. Might be this led to my confusion.)I have corrected it in the post.
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