There are 3 related highlight settings in Tools / Options / Environment / Fonts and Colors
Highlighted reference (A)
VA Find reference (B)
VA Find reference (modified) (C)
If I move onto a variable with the cursor then all references become highlighted using (A). If I move away from that place to a neutral area (for example end of line after a semicolon) then the highlighted texts change colors to (B) and (C) correctly.
I would like to see (B) and (C) coloring while I am on the variable with the cursor.
I tried to turn on and off many things in Options and Visual Assist Options, but couldn't find any good combination. Searching the Internet hasn't helped (at least yet).
UPDATE
"Productivity Power Tools" came into play. I will post an answer for reference for other users in distress.
Productivity power tools has a conflicting option group on the Tools / Options / Productivity Power Tools / Other extensions page, namely "Match margin options". It has two options (Show matches in the margin, Show matches in the editor). Both needs to be unchecked.
Related
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!
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 hope this is okay to ask on SO, I'm not sure. I apologize if it shouldn't be here.
I reinstalled Visual Studio Professional 2015 yesterday due to a few issues I was having. With the new installation, my line numbers have a very wide section where the mouse reverses direction and select the entire line if clicked. I don't recall this area being so wide on any of my previous installations of VS2015; I know it was there in the first place. Is there a way to disable this?
This is the area where this happens, boxed in green. It's much wider than the line numbers fill (only 147 lines in this file).
There are two "margins" available in Visual Studio 2015: Selection and Indicator available under Tools > Options > Text Editor > General > Display. Turning these off remove some, but not all of the "extra space" and the feature of highlighting an entire line is still there.
If you want to turn them off because the extra space is bothersome, keep in mind you will not be able to see breakpoints unless "highlight current line" is checked.
Initial note: I'm not getting any responses over on superuser to my question, so please allow me to ask this here:
I inherited a VS solution with a bunch of unorthodox settings. I'm not at liberty to wipe out all those settings and start over. So there is 1 setting I want to change back to VS default but cannot find it.
In a normal/default VS c# environment, when you click the mouse on a line of code that hasn't been written yet (empty, no spaces, no code, no tabs), the cursor automatically positions to the beginning of where the line of code should begin. If it's just inside a foreach, if, or etc, it will indent a bit from the left edge according to tab rules, etc.
But in the weird VS settings I have, wherever I click, the cursor positions at that exact spot. So if I click on col 20 of the next line, the cursor remains at col 20 rather than auto-repositioning to col 5 or wherever it should be. This is SO annoying because I can't always eyeball where the cursor should be and I end up clicking at the end of the previous line, then hitting ENTER, at which time it goes to the next line and positions the cursor at the right place.
How can I fix this?
It is controlled by the Enable virtual space option. See Visual Studio options - Text Editor - C#. By default it is off/unchecked.
I resolved this issue by applying Sergey's suggested change (Visual Studio options -> Text Editor -> C# -> Enable Virtual Space [check]), but also enabled (Options -> Text Editor -> C# -> Tabs -> Smart).
I've been using vs2013 for quite some time and noticed something that is quite bothering me.
In the Code Editor, lines that contain nothing but symbols (such as '{', '/' '*' etc..) have a different line‑height / font‑size than other lines that also contain letters.
I search through the settings and couldn't find a way to turn this behavior off.
My question is if there's a way to turn this behavior off, and have consistent line heights throughout my entire code.
You probably have Productivity Power Tools installed with Syntactic line compression enabled. You can turn it off in VS Options - Productivity Power Tools - Other Extensions.
For the VS2019 it is quite similar to the provided solutions:
Tools -> Options-> Productiviry Power Tools -> General
Under "Syntatic line compression options"
you uncheck:
"Compress lines that does not have any alphanumeric characters" like {,[ and so on
You also can uncheck
"Compress blank lines" but this will be only for lines without anything in it.