Which Visual Studio Color Theme?

Question

Which Visual Studio Color Theme do you use?

Do you find that the darker themes work best for you? Do they help ease your eye strain?

What is your favorite color theme & where can I get it?

Answer 1

http://www.iunknown.com/2007/06/vibrant_ink_vis.html

Helped my eye strain, but is a personal pref for sure.

Answer 2

I have a homebrew theme.. nothing special except for one thing: I make literals (strings and numbers) really pop out to remind me/encourage me not to hardcode things.

Answer 3

I like dark themes with black or some dark gray background. To much light that white background generates causes me eye strain.

Also WPF antialiasing looks much better on dark background. Text is too blurry on white background.

Answer 4

I prefer dark themes, and use a variant of this one. It definitely helps with the eye strain. Unfortunately you can't seem to theme all the Visual Studio windows consistently which makes things look a little garish.

I also switch all the console windows to a dark green text on black background to reduce 'glare'.

Answer 5

I find dark color schemes strain my eyes more than those with a white/light background. I took Jeff Atwood's variation (Is Your IDE Hot or Not?) and tweaked the colors a bit for my liking.

Answer 6

I've concluded that a black background works best because I can perceive a wider variety of colors, which is useful for me since Visual Studio lets you color a variety of different things (giving different colors to struct, class, and interface types, for instance). Somehow, it seems harder to distinguish small color differences on a white background than black.

But don't take my word for it. Take a look and make up your own mind:

http://loyc-etc.blogspot.com/2008/09/bitstream-vera-sans-mono-bold.html

Answer 7

My eyes have been a lot happier since I switched to zenburn after reading Jeff's post.

Answer 8

I use my own custom themes, which i call "Elements". I've put Elements Blue up at Studio Styles, and here's the link: http://studiostyles.info/schemes/elements-blue . I recommend Consolas 11pt font.

Answer 9

I use a port of vim's oceandeep - the background's actually blue, not black. There's a whole bunch of schemes listed here if you want to roll your own from the .vim configs.

Answer 10

I agree with muloh. Do you know that black text on white background is more contrast (read as it is more readable) than white text on black background. Dark themes may be useful if you like to work in the evening but not in the middle of the day. Your eyes take information not only from a screen but also from other space in your room and if your room is in light colors but your screen is in dark then your eyes must be harder to distinguish items on your display. Your eye is like a photo camera in auto mode - it must define values for contrast/brightness settings - so it is better for it when all surface has the same values - in this case it doesn't do any work to change focus on another object.

One more problem with VS dark themes - it is impossible to change color for Solution Explorer for example! You can only hide it when you coding. But again - if you need to open another file you must open Solution Explorer and "bang!" background is changed from dark (your pupils are big) to white (they must to do something to get smaller - its a pain for them).

Wish you be healthy