Visual Studio Fonts and Colors - Ref Keyword

Question

I just imported new fonts and colors for Visual Studio 2008. I want to change the color on the ref keyword on a parameter to stand out a little more. Anyone know what option that is in the Display Items under Fonts and Colors?

Answer 1

That's not how syntax highlighting works in VS2008. It is done by 'lexical analysis', not a language parser. In other words, it tokenizes the text in the source code file and classifies them by lexical type. Keyword, identifier, number, string literal, comment, whitespace. And gives them their associated color.

It is important that it works that way because lexical analysis is fast, parsing is slow. Getting text to repaint in a text editor needs to be fast. Accordingly, it has no option to classify individual keywords, the only option you got is the "Keyword" color in the dialog. Which changes the color of all keywords, not just ref.