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.
Related
How can one change foreground (text color) of code completion box items while Fonts and Colors do not allow this?
If you want this change you can count on that it’s little bit tricky such it will affect other (more) items. So foreground will be changed in other undesired places.
Steps:
Install Color Theme Editor for Visual Studio.
In theme editor use Show All Elements toggle.
Find Environment ⟶ CommandBarTextActive.
Change color as you wish.
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.
Where my arrow is pointing I have seen various people who have changed the color of the highlight to blue or cyan or some other color that is easier to see and "pops out" more. I have tried searching on stack overflow and the internet and have been unsuccessful at finding how to change this specific thing rather than changing the entire color of all highlighting text. Basically when you click next to an end brace or beginning it highlights the other one but in my case its grey and I would like it to be blue or something better. How do I do this? Sorry I don't have enough reputation to post the image in this specific post.
I looked through Tools > Options > Fonts and Colors for nearly every option and changed lots of things around, but nothing changed the way it highlights those braces when you click next to one. I was able to successfully change the color it highlights it but the second I release my mouse it changes back to grey.
Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors
Resharper Brace Outline
Resharper Matched Brace Items
To change whether to display color or outline, go to Resharper Options:
Resharper > Environment > Editor > Highlight with [x] color [ ] outline
ReSharper Help/Highlighting Matching Delimiters
I've started using Visual Studio 2015 and one thing I've noticed is the new fancy rich-text formatted Preview functionality when hovering over a Method, .ctor, Property etc (compared to the bare tooltip I see in VS2013), which looks for example like this (mouse cursor is not shown here):
However, this is, most likely due to my general text color & font customization, in parts barely readable.
Does anyone know what's the correct name and category for this enhanced ToolTip is in VS's Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors?
The tooltip code colors correspond to the colors you have set for the editor window. The white you see is the same as you see in the editor.
You might want to change the tooltip background color instead to something darker.
You want to change the 'Editor Tooltip'
Use these steps:
Options -> Environment -> Fonts & Colors
Show settings for: Editor Tooltip
Adjust 'Plain Text'
Here is my scenario. I like my color scheme. I have a dark blue background with light grey text. I have the Plain Text option in VS 2010 in Tools | Options | Environment | Fonts and Colors set to be a dark grey for the foreground and dark blue for the background:
alt text http://www.elbalazo.net/post/vs_plaintext_color.jpg
But I need to fix this major problem/annoyance which is when I highlight some text and then lost focus with my mouse it turns almost completely white!
alt text http://www.elbalazo.net/post/WhiteBackgroundVS2.jpg
And worse, when I mouse over the little section lines of code on the left, the selection of the entire editor goes white with a light grey foreground for text:
alt text http://www.elbalazo.net/post/WhiteBackgoundVS.jpg
Not able to figure out where and how to fix this. I don't see a way. Note: I'm using R# 5.0+ so I don't know if that has anything to do with this color issue or what...maybe it's overriding some VS stuff or this is just a VS issue I don't know..probably just not looking in the right area under Fonts and colors...but a lot of the item foreground elements are read only.
UPDATED:
I think it might be (not sure) this one but I can't test it as the foreground is locked and not editable:
alt text http://www.elbalazo.net/post/vs_brachmatching_color.jpg
I'm pretty sure your first problem can be solved by setting the colors on the 'Highlighted Reference' option in the Fonts and Colors window. If ReSharper is override this setting I couldn't tell you. I don't have it installed on this machine. As for your second problem I have no idea.
If you get too irritated at trying to figure out the color options you could also try Studio Styles for pre-made ones. I believe that is where I got the one I use currently.
I believe the setting you are looking for is "Inactive Selected Text". Found while trying to figure out why my selected search texts were not highlighted in an obvious manner.
Might be a year late... answering for future searches.
ReSharper is indeed overriding some of your settings, but those settings can be found in the same screen, towards the bottom of the listbox.
In Tools | Options | Environment | Fonts and Colors, scroll to the bottom of the 'Display Items:' listbox, and you should see a series of settings that start with ReSharper. For instance, the 'ReSharper Current Line Highlight` was causing me issues when I changed my theme to use a dark background.
Hope that helps.
The highlight for matching references is the "Highlighted Reference" background color (as Sean Copenhaver pointed out).
The highlight for the outlining region hover is "Collapsed Region" (as Brandon Satrom pointed out in his comment on the original question). The foreground color is the color used in the outlining margin and the background color is the color used under the text. You can also disable that highlight by disabling Tools->Options->Environment->General->Enable rich client visual experience, though that will disable other things (animations, gradients, etc.)
The brace matching rectangle is the highlight that appears when you insert or put the caret on a brace (e.g. ")", "]", "}"). It only lets you override the background color because you can't use it to change the foreground (text) color.
I had this same problem (much later) with VS 2010 and R# 7.1.
Disable the "Highlight current line" option in ReSharper > Options > Environment > Editor.
That option, when enabled, causes the VS 2010 color options for Highlighted Reference to not apply.
FWIW I had this problem without ReSharper and in my case tracked it down to the Brace Matching (Rectangle) color setting which looked nothing like what I was seeing in the editor but allowed me to fix the issue anyway.
So this is weird but I was having the same problem and it simply went away when I went to Tools->Options->Environment->Fonts and Colors and changed the font size to 18. I then went back in the same menu and changes it back to 10 (default) and the editor no longer highlights the collapsible regions white. Strange behavior.