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.
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 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.
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.
Visual Studio 2010 highlights all references to the same variable (or class) when your cursor is placed over it.
with the theme I use highlighted references are white on white - making them virtually impossible to read. what is the name of "display item" in Options-> Environment Fonts and Colors that is responsible for that color?
changing Plain Text to a darker one partially solves an issue however that also changes color for lots of other stuff on a screen, so ideally would be to change a background for this type of "selection"..
There's one called "Highlighted Reference". You can only change the background color, I believe.