Dirk.Net

Developers have been experimenting with darker color schemes for Visual Studio, aiming to port their beloved Textmate or Vim environment to other IDEs including VS.

The Textmate Vibrant Ink theme was ported for Visual Studio and recently improved. Zenburn was ported from Vim to Visual Studio.

Collections of other dark color themes can be found here, here, and here. Some like them, some don’t.

I was in the latter group until recently. That was when I came across the Aloha scheme for Netbeans 6, which is based on the work of Carmelyne Thompson inspired by the RubyRobot scheme for Textmate.

I find the colors very enchanting so I went ahead and created an approximation of the Aloha theme for Visual Studio. I made the following changes:

• Changed the font to Consolas 10 from Monaco 12. You can download the “original” Monaco font for Windows here.
• Changed the green (102,153,51) strings to a light blue (191,191,255).

Please note that this a just and approximation and not an exact port for every language. Then again, why should it be? You can tweak the settings yourself quite easily in Options>Environment>Fonts and Colors.

Here’s a screen shot:

You can download the vssettings file and import it in Tools>Import and Export Settings…

In Visual Studio 2005 you will get a message similar to this:

Simply open the file in Notepad and replace

<ApplicationIdentity version=”9.0″/>

with

<ApplicationIdentity version=”8.0″/>

and it should import just fine.

One more thing: When you export the font and color settings, deselect all settings first and then just select Options>Environment>Fonts and Colors, so that the Export dialog looks like so:

Enjoy!