The problem is displayed in this image.
Changing the item background color for Highlighted Reference helps a bit but they are still highlighted with boxes around them. In the old versions of Visual Studio it was caused by productivity power tools extension and there was an option to disable it. I do not have productivity power tools extension installed on Visual Studio 2022.
There seems to be options to disable this for languages like c#. Is there a way to completely remove this highlighting in editors for "All Languages"?
There doesn't seem to be a setting that turns it off for all languages, however if you change the RBG values to 30 for all three (if you are using the default dark theme in Visual Studio), you can essentially achieve this, since the highlighting will be the same exact color as the background, thus hiding it. To change these, click the "Custom..." button for both the items foreground and background and set the red, green, and blue values to 30. The rest of the values should automatically adjust.
The problem is, Highlighted Reference doesn't cover everything. You probably will also want to set the same RGB values for Highlighted Written Reference and Highlighted Definition, otherwise some things will still get highlighted.
Here is a .gif showing how this works will all three of these settings set to 30 in a C# code file:
You actually have one more Highlighted setting than my Visual Studio installation (perhaps I need an update) and that is the Highlighted Parameter one. Presumably, that controls the highlight of parameters to methods and such. I would assume you'd want that to also be set to 30 for the RBG values.
Also, you may notice that in the .gif it looks like there is a box around the item my cursor is under - that is because of the Highlight Current Line setting. You can also set that to 30 for the RBG values to achieve a 100% un-highlighted experience, but that might be going a bit extreme!
Related
So, I was wondering if someone knows a program (VS extension) that you can for example, click on a button (aka option), than you select what element (in your code) you want to edit, pick a new color and save it...?
eg. you click on void, it says something like, selected Data Types, and a window to edit color. Or you click on a scroll bar, it says something like, selected scroll bar, and so one..
I was looking for it, but all I can find is basically like "Color picker", "Color theme editor for Visual Studio"...
Even if it's not extension, maybe program or web site...
Thanks in advance.
OK... So there is some way to make it easier, but it's still quite boring / hard / annoying task to do. (Works only with Visual Studio 2019)
Download Visual Studio Color Theme Designer.
You'll need some sort of capturing technique (eg. Snipping Tool - comes with Windows 10).
Launch your VS2019 and capture element/color you want to edit.
Extract the hex value of that color (eg. Paint 3D - comes with Windows 10).
Follow the instructions on VSCTD website (Marketplace) on creating theme and when you're done with opening solution, in "All elements" page, paste the value you got, and to make it easier to search, select "Sort by: Color".
Edit the color you think corresponds to desired element and check if that's the color that you were looking for.
Repeat until you're done.
This method is similar to using Color Theme Editor for Visual Studio 2019, but it gives you option to create automatically some theme and then you edit small parts of it (removes the trouble of editing huge amounts of colors)
You can edit color themes for types of keywords for a language in Visual Studio. For example, I've set mine so that interfaces are a light purple instead of the normal blue.
As far as I know, you can't set the colors for a specific object (like have variable 1 in orange, and variable 2 in gray), but you can set the font colors for code types (so structs are orange, and classes are gray).
You can read more about this here.
I've installed the color theme customization plug-in for Visual Studio 2013, and am having difficulty identifying and changing the background and foreground colors for Intellisense areas displayed on mouse-over events.
A screen shot is below showing the two areas that I'm struggling with. The top shows the helper dialog which appears when I delete and re-add the opening parentheses next at the line showing "#Html.PropertyFor(". Either I need to adjust the foreground color for the very light grey text, or change the background to something darker than the off white.
The second picture shows a typical Intellisense box. But the contrast on that is too low, so I need to either make the foreground text lighter, or the background box lighter.
After searching in the theme editor for quite some time, I'm unable to isolate these settings. I also inspected several settings under Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors, but was unable to identify these specific foreground/background combinations in the intellisense tool tips. I need assistance fixing both of these areas. Thanks for your help.
=== Edit 12/2/2014 at 4:33 PM ===
I found part of the solution. To make the text lighter, select Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors. Then toggle the Show Settings For list to "Editor Tooltip". You can change the "Plain Text" foreground color. But the background color cannot be edited. So I changed the foreground to white. This helped with case 2 shown above.
But with case 1, where there is a highlighted line for the available method overloads, that text still has a white background. I still need a solution for that. How can I make that white background dark? Thanks.
=== Edit 7/24/2015 8:00 AM Central ===
Joe, thanks for your suggestion. Yes, I have Productivity Power Tools installed. After turning "Colorized Parameter Help" off, the hint shown in the first graphic above went completely white. Probably that's because I have the foreground color set to White (ala Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors). Here is an example.
So I turned "Colorized Parameter Help" back on, and this is what it looks like for me right now.
This is at least legible, though the colorization is gone. I still don't know how to make that white background dark in that specific dialog. Since I can at least read the text with the workaround, this is a low priority item. What I imagine is that the ability to tweak that setting just doesn't exist within the color theme customization plug-in.
Do you have the Productivity Power Tools add-in installed? If so, either remove it or set Colorized Parameter Help to off under Tools > Options > Productivity Power Tools.
I would like to show a vertical line, next to the linenumbers, in my visual studio 2010 between parentheses when my courser is between those 2 parantheses.
I alread had that option enabled, but somehow its gone.
edit: is nobody using that feature? one of the very nice things when you are debugging
Is no one using that feature??
Edit: so last push!! there must be a way to see where the space between parentheses starts and ends.
edit: here is an image
EDIT: I still haven't found what i'm looking for. VS is so powerful there must somewhere an option or a plugin. It is really useful when you can see where your { begins and ends }.
Anyone a clue?
I haven't seen the horizontal line feature since 2008. I hated it so I haven't been looking for it either.
You should however be able to see the braces being highlighted when your cursor is on them. If not, perhaps you've changed your theme or possibly some colors in your Options menu.
Here's what you should try:
Tools ->
Options(down at the bottom of the drop-down) ->
Environment ->
Fonts and Colors
Make sure the Show settings for: selector is showing Text Editor.
The one(s) you're looking for are Brace Matching (Highlight/Rectangle).
Attempt to change it to your choosing and see if the changes take place. If not, reset to the defaults and re-check it's enabled.
Also...
Another suggestion that can be handy to get a temporary look at the extents of the body you can hover your mouse just along the margin it will highlight the most nested body. You may have to do some tweaking of your colors to make it vibrant. I use a darker color and have my code block highlighting white. I know it's not what you're looking for but it might be somewhat of a band aid.
I am using Resharper 6.x with VS2010. One of the features is that if you double click on a variable, it is highlighted and then other usages of the variable are highlighted, like so:
The background and foreground colors of the highlighted variable are too close to each other and I am trying to change it in the Options/Fonts and Colors dialog. It has a small Sample window (below). I've gone through the entire list of display items and can't find the one matching what I see in the coding window.
So 2 questions:
Which display item should I change to affect the back/fore colors of the highlighted variables?
Is there some tool that that will point me to the display item in question for any piece of code?
P.S. I am using the Ragnarok as my base color theme.
P.P.S. This may have nothing to do with Resharper. I turned it off and the coloring was still there. I guess my original question still stands - how to affect the colors of the highlighted variables.
Visual Studio 2010 Reference Highlighting
As you already presumed: The reference highlighting of current selection is not a ReSharper feature but a VS 2010 feature. So you need to look at VS items in Fonts and Colors dialog.
The right display item is Highlighted Reference.
ReSharper Reference Highlighting
ReSharper's equivalent is Highlight usages in file by pressing Shift+Alt+F11.
Then all read references have light blue background color (related display item in Fonts and Colors dialog is ReSharper Read Usage).
And all write references have rose background color (related display item in Fonts and Colors dialog is ReSharper Write Usage).
But the disadvantage of ReSharper's reference highlighting is that you need to press a shortcut. VS does the highlighting automatically.
Faced problem while setting background color for any element in Visual Studio 2010 editor. Selection color doesn't override this background color. So then it's very inconvenient to work with selections in editor.
Case when only string literal is selected it's almost impossible to distinguish colors and see what part of string is selected.
Is there any possibility to fix the problem by changing some options? Or it's a Visual Studio bug?
This is new VS2010 behavior which unfortunately is deliberate. However, Noah Richards (from the editor team) has written a couple of extensions that help mitigate the new behavior:
The first is an extension that draws a border around the selection (the main feature of the extension is a gradient background, but the border is what makes it really useful for me).
Second is an extension to change Selection Foreground color.