I’m in the process of migrating from Mono Develop to Visual Studio, but it seems Visual Studio is severely lacking in color customization options? It has one color for keywords and one color for user types, but I require so much more fine grained control. How can I accomplish that?
I found the dark Mono Develop (Oblivion) theme for Visual Studio so let’s use that as an example. This is how it looks in Mono Develop:
This is how it looks in Visual Studio:
It’s like everything is covered by the keyword-color which is purple. At the very least I want float to be colored green, but I would prefer to have control over the color for if/else, new, return, void and the method name as well.
Visual Studio is sooo much faster and I just can’t convince myself to use Mono Develop anymore because it’s such a buggy mess. But at the same time I’m so anal about these things and would prefer not to spend the next couple of days trying to fix it, especially if it’s not possible.
I would first ask why you’d want to do that? The coloring is different for a reason. float and bool (as well as int, etc) are primitive types and thus have a color, while Vector3, Transform (or any other class, struct, interface or enumeration you create) are complex types and thus get their own color. That being said, I believe it’s in the Tools → Customize menu. I don’t have VS installed on this PC so I’ll have to look when I get back to one.
The problem is that Visual Studio treats everything equally. Changing that one color changes everything. And I don’t care if it’s a bool, float, Gameobject or Transform. To me it’s just a type and I want them all to be colored the same, and I want it not to have the same color as void, public, return etc.
But mainly it pisses me off when I have a preference and one app, in this case the de facto standard app, won’t let me do things my way. It’s so unnecessary. Give me the customization I need to make my environment how I want it, please.
And in this case I feel like that’s the primary purpose of syntax highlighting. To quickly be able to scan the code and see what’s what. At work I use code editors where it’s trivial to set up the exact coloring I want for each word through CSS or XML. I like being able to see all the if/else/for/while immediately, all the method names immediately. Visual Studio feels very out of date in this regard. Mono Develop was very lackluster as well, but it was slightly better at this one thing. At least unless I’m able to fix it.
And I’m pretty sure you can’t fix it without special scripting or whatever they’re trying to explain to me in that documentation entry. I looked everywhere. The only colors you can set for these are keyword and User type. Ideally I would want them to be split into 10-20 different colors.
There are other things with the look of the Text Editor I’m not able to change which seem to be hard coded as well. Like the code folding column which has to be visible giving me a ~10px padding to the left of my code which makes me think I’ve indented it wrong.
I don’t know man, ill have a look bit those are such trivial nit picky things. Visual studio is a rock solid IDE and no tool can be everything to everyone. I use it for 8+ hours per day every day… I guess you just get used to the way it colors.
