Like many people who do a lot of work on *NIX systems, I prefer a dark theme for text editing (darker background with lighter text). Now, I've got Visual Studio configured to use a nice dark theme in the text editor just fine, but I'd like to extend that to theming the rest of the user interface as well. For example:



As you can see from the above picture, the last holdout is the background color for docking windows like the class view/solution explorer. I've been looking and asking around and as far as I can tell, it just can't be done :(

Does anybody know how I can do this? Change that background color from bright white to something easier on the eyes?

Not really a programming topic, so I'm going to slide this on over to the Lounge.

Thanks, wasn't really sure where to put it :)

Im sure it is possible.
Just buried away somewhere

A/ the registry :)
B/ make a change to the color settings in vc, exit the program + see what files have changed in MSVC dir, u should be able to find a candidate quite easily

Quote: Original post by zedz
Im sure it is possible.
Just buried away somewhere

A/ the registry :)
B/ make a change to the color settings in vc, exit the program + see what files have changed in MSVC dir, u should be able to find a candidate quite easily

Believe me, I've tried. Visual Studio actually stores your settings in an XML format file that's pretty easy to look through. The problem is, background color for those windows isn't one of the available settings! (at least as far as I can tell)

You can always change the color in Windows itself...so that all UI controls are colored the way you want in VS.

Considering that that area has the same colors as the combobox in that screenshot (both the background and the text), I'm thinking it's taken from the system-wide color settings.

Try switching to high contrast mode by either the theme selector or by the keyboard shortcut: left ctrl+left shift+PrtScn

Quote: Original post by shuma-gorath
Considering that that area has the same colors as the combobox in that screenshot (both the background and the text), I'm thinking it's taken from the system-wide color settings.

This.

This is really hackish but may just work. Go to your graphic card's controls (both ATI and nVidia should have them) and go into whatever section allows you to adjust your screen colors. You may have an option to invert colors (or do it manually by moving some color-mapping graphs around).