My Dark Visual Studio Theme - Update

Some of you must have already tried my Dark Visual Studio Theme from http://blog.prabir.me/post/My-Visual-Studio-Theme.aspx as seen below.

But as I upgraded to Visual Studio 2010, some of the colors didn’t seem to go well with the new WPF editor.

As you can see above, you cannot read the text at all, and its too bright which breaks the total aim of the theme. I have upgraded the theme to have better support in VS2010. Tweaked a bit of settings to suit VS2010.

Now the fixed one would look like this.

There are others changes also especially to the .aspx pages. When you upgrade my VS2008 settings in 2010 it would be displayed as below. The <% %> colors are unreadable. The same with JavaScript keywords (function…) and strings. And for some reasons, the HTML attribute the appears in red which it should not had been as shows below. (for some reason VS2010 didn’t upgrade this particular setting – HTML attribute name color)

Now that I have fixed, it is more pleasant as you can see the updated version below.

Now its better. I had to make some changes like the keyword to green which is the same as in C#, because the blue as in VS2008 didn’t seem to work at all. It was too blurry. The same with strings – defaulted to C# type coloring. I hope the C# type coloring in JavaScript will help you get familiar more easily.

Any other stuffs I forgot to update, please leave a comment below.

Read my original article on the dark theme on why you should shift @ http://blog.prabir.me/post/My-Visual-Studio-Theme.aspx

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

Prabir.vssettings (209.98 kb) [For VS2010] (Right click and Save Target As ...)

CurrentSettings.vssettings [For VS2008](252.68 kb) (Right Click and Save Target As ...)

Consolas Font Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or 2008.exe (4.33 mb)

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

[UPDATE]

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