Rails-y TextMate Theme For Visual Studio

Tuesday, August 14 2007 - Blog

I get eye-strain headaches sometimes, and it really sucks. A lot of this has to do with the black-on-white default settings that VS uses. The good news is that you can changes this :).

A lot has been written about IDEs and their colors, and none (to me) is more impressive than TextMate's Vibrant Ink:

I really like the Monaco font, and the black background cuts down on the overall glare. Jon Lam recently created the Vibrant Ink theme and released it on his blog, but he also included his full settings which for some (me included) were a little much. I tweaked his theme a bit by adding in the Monaco font (pictured above) and raising the pure black a few shades so the contrast isn't as drastic:

I've attached below the theme I use, plus two others I really like - MidTones (you can see more here) and Jeff Atwood's super groovy settings (codenamed Pruno).

In addition I've included the Monaco font (pictured above) - to install just drag it into your System/Fonts folder.

Download the theme here.

Damien Guard says:

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Nice theme, will try this for a while :)

You might also like to try my Envy Code R at 10 point if you like small fonts that work well with ClearType.

[)amien

Zack Owens says:

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

To just import John Lam's color settings without the other stuff, when you are doing the import, uncheck everything and check "Fonts and Colors" under Environment.

I went throught the same thing... I'm not a fan of his other modification. Hope this will simplify your John Lam theme importing :)

Luke Foust says:

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

I have decided to try out your theme for a while as well. I actually increased the font size because I like big fonts better and I changed the font to Consolas.

One thing though, I noticed that i no longer get the highlighting when I close off a parenthesis to know that there is a matching parenthesis on the other side. Is this not something you can customize? I found a setting in VS called "Brace Matching" but that didn't seem to change anything.

Any thoughts?

Rick Strahl says:

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

A little side note - I used to get nasty headaches and eye problems as well - for me turning off ClearType helps tremendously. Everything is immediately much sharper and your eyes and brain have to work a lot less to process visual input at the cost of a little less smooth UI.

Adam Nofsinger says:

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

@Luke Foust:

I think you are messing with "Brace Matching (Highlight)" in the VS Fonts and Colors setting. Try instead to play around with the Item Background attribute of "Brace Matching (Rectangle)". I set mine to red or something like that and it works as advertised again.

@Rob:

Thanks for this! I tried to go to a "light-on-dark" theme in VS about 2 weeks ago and couldn't stick with one. They rubbed me the wrong way even after using them for an hour or so. This one somehow appeals to me instantly, I think I'll be able to keep going with this one.

One little tweak I did, besides the Brace Matching described above, was to set a color (dark pink for me) for "Number" item in Fonts and Colors. I like having "magic numbers" stick out in my code, but maybe that is just me. It makes your for(int i = 0;...) loops easier to read IMHO.