Improving Your Visual Studio Workspace - Playing with the colors
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The colors of the text editor inside Visual Studio are white-based. I mean that the background is white, while the code inside the field is colored in a variety of ways that will let you distinguish a class name from a function and so on. At least, in theory, this is how it should be.
Moreover, the most basic fonts we use for our web pages fail to provide a clear difference between the characters. Just think about the frustration caused by a mismatched O letter with the zero (0). Someone realized that this is intolerable in programming. Therefore, programming fonts were born.
These were built with programmers in mind. Most of them focus on making each character as different as possible from the others. The creators of such fonts were programmers themselves, and they published their work on their personal web sites or in their personal blogs. You can find a nice collection of them here.
Another important trait of programming fonts is that these are monospace types. This means that every character will occupy the same amount of space, ensuring that the code is aligned perfectly inside the IDE. You can see a good comparison with images here. The new fonts improved the overall viewing experience; nevertheless, something was still missing.
Many people said that in practice, the white background is more limiting, and besides, it lights up your room. It is hard to distinguish keywords from variables, the contrast between objects is too small and enumeration can go on and on. Considering that the syntax recognizing part of it works well, it only required a little tweaking inside the options at the Fonts and Colors Tab.
The dark side, although a more dull color, offers greater liberty in choosing colors that will literally jump out at you. Soon enough, a "join the dark side" wave crashed over the net and the blogs of developers. Here is a comparison of the default settings and modifications based on the dark flourish:
You can transform the upper image into the one below:
This is certainly a dramatic improvement if you stay in front of monitors for hours. At least it will work well until you mix your code writing with sessions of reading and writing in tools that are all designed with a white background (like reading PDFs and using OneNote from Office Suite). If this is the case, switching between them can turn out to be a painful task if you have sensitive eyes.
If you have little time to waste with finding a good contrast yourself, or you are simply not in the mood to play around with the configuration tab, you can reuse the settings already made by others. The "Import and Export Settings..." menu from Tools is the place to search once you want to save or import color settings. Around the web you will find countless settings, most of the time on the blogs of fellow programmers.
For starters, look at the following blogs here, here, here or here. As for myself, I like the following two. The first has the merit of giving a greater contrast, while the second one offers more relaxing, yet distinguishable colors. Which one you prefer is up to you. I invite you to query the following menu and come up with your own ideas, and once you are done, come back and share them with us.
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