Visual Studio different colour for constants, function names etc. ?

Question

I know that you can change text editor colours but all the things I want to customized in one group "Identifiers".

Is there a way to break that group into "Variables","Constants","Functions" and things like that so I can customize colours for those things separately?

Answer 1

Not in the default settings. It's probably possible to do it through add-ins, but you may have to write one yourself as I don't know of any that offer this functionality (although they may exist).

Answer 2

Impossible with default settings as far as I know. (And I sincerely hope I'm wrong)

Answer 3

Current syntax coloring options are based on what can be easily recognized by the kind of rules a lexer uses. Coloring functional identifiers requires much more, the editor would actually have to parse the statements. That's an iffy proposition while you are entering code into the editor, especially when that code contains bad syntax or typing mistakes. Some of this is actually done by the IntelliSense parser but that's a feature that is disjoint from the basic editor implementation.

Changes are coming in VS2010, its extensibility model adds support for custom syntax highlighting through MEF plug-ins. To what degree this will be used for default coloring of a specific language isn't that clear to me. I don't see any hard promises yet.

Answer 4

This can be achieved via different add-ins. Good commercial example is ReSharper.

Also there's syntax highlighting framework that allows to analyze source code and provide custom styles for any lexical elements (more on MSDN).