Visual Studio color settings for better eye

Question

Which Visual Studio color settings is more comfortable to reduce eye strain? Whether dark setting or default (black text on white background) is best for eyes?

Answer 1

My personal preference is black text on white background, Consolas font, 11pt.

Our very own Jeff Atwood has posts on Code Colorizing and Readability and Programming Fonts.

Answer 2

I like Zenburn

Answer 3

I like very much dark background themes, I can work much more time, reducing eye strain.

I specially like this VibrantInk theme port.

You can generate Themes with this utility.

Answer 4

I like Rob Connery's TextMate theme for VS.

Answer 5

I like textmate from This Site

Very nice theme

Answer 6

I like the Vibrant Ink theme.

Zenburn is also really nice. I like a dark background.

Answer 7

Light yellow text on a blue background. The brightness of a white background gets to me after a while.

Answer 8

I find both of these two options have too much contrast: I prefer a dark gray background with light colored fonts -- but not too bright.

Apparently, some people are fine staring at a black-on-white screen all day; I'm not that lucky, but by keeping the overall display dark and the contrast low, I'm able to spend waay too much time staring at the screen too. ;-)

Answer 9

There's a bunch of IDE schemes at http://idehotornot.ning.com/

Caveat Emptor: Not all are for Visual Studio and personally I think most of them stink.

Answer 10

I personally prefer light text on black background and I'm currently using a slightly modified theme posted here as this one supports R# quite well.

Answer 11

I like my theme too :) http://blog.wekeroad.com/2007/10/17/textmate-theme-for-visual-studio-take-2/

which is based on TextMate's vibrant ink. I even have a copy of Monaco font for ya.

Answer 12

I know this is really old post but it's the #1 result in Google. Here is my color settings, i call it Steam because it uses the colors from the Steam gaming platform. It was inspired by VibrantInk. It keeps the usual scheme, blue for keywords, red for strings, etc.

This is for 2010, and i did the color edits for all filetypes, xml, vb, css, xmal, etc.

Also it includes resharper colors! Download it here: Steam Colors for visual studio

Answer 13

I like the Zenburn 2010 link from: http://studiostyles.info/ Lot's of other nice styles there as well. Stole the link from Hanselman.

Answer 14

I like the way you can create your own visual studio styles at this site: http://studiostyles.info/.