Introducing Collection of New Visual Studio Themes!

Grace Taylor

September 20th, 202130 0

We are on a journey to make Visual Studio more flexible than ever, so that you can make the IDE work just the way you like it! One of our key focus areas for Visual Studio 2022 is to build a personal, flexible IDE that you can make your own. We’ve teamed up with theme authors from the community to test a new tool that converts VS Code themes to work in Visual Studio. This way, you now have the flexibility to choose from new community themes in Visual Studio 2022.

Image Personalize Visual Studio with Community Themes
Personalize Visual Studio with Community Themes

We know that picking a great theme is as important as picking an office chair. Every developer has unique personalization preferences. We’ve been building capabilities for syncing your VS theme to your Windows theme, new ways to manage your tabs and documents, and color coding your workspace. Now, we’re working with community theme authors to test a new theme conversion tool so that Visual Studio can further fit your habits and preferences.

 

Introducing collection of community VS themes

We would like to extend our gratitude to our dedicated community of theme authors and maintainers for creating amazing themes, both as converted and original Visual Studio themes. Thank you to everyone who has contributed themes to the Visual Studio family Marketplace. We’ve teamed up with the theme authors below to convert their VS Code theme to work in VS. The themes below are most compatible with Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4 and later. The initial version of these converted themes work best with C# and C++.

Winter is Coming VS Theme

A dark theme maintained by Mads Kristensen and created in cooperation with John Papa. The theme colors feature blues and purples, with accent colors in yellow and green to lift the code off the page.

Image Winter is Coming Visual Studio Theme
Winter is Coming theme in Visual Studio

Cyberpunk VS Theme

A bright, colorful theme published by Maximiliano Saavedra. The author designed this theme to include a wide range of colors, so that developers can identify and recall different elements quickly.

Image Cyberpunk Visual Studio Theme
Cyberpunk theme displayed in Visual Studio

One Monokai VS Theme

A cross between Monokai and One Dark theme, published by Joshua Azemoh. One Monokai features classic colors laid out in a pleasing way.

Image OneMonokai Visual Studio Theme
OneMonokai theme displayed in Visual Studio

Ayu VS Theme

This clean, simple VS theme comes in three colors, published by Ike. Ayu was designed for all-day comfort when viewing the screen. Ayu comes in three helpful versions: dark, light, and mirage.

Image Ayu Light Visual Studio Theme
Ayu Light theme displayed in Visual Studio

Nord VS Theme

This elegant, icy theme is published by Arctic Ice Studio. Nord features complementary colors in bluish-grey white tones.

Image Nord Visual Studio Theme
Nord theme displayed in Visual Studio Theme

OneDarkPro VS Theme

The iconic, classic theme adapted from Atom, published by binarify. OneDarkPro’s muted iconic look and feel helps folks feel right at home.

Image OneDarkPro Visual Studio Theme
OneDarkPro theme displayed in Visual Studio

Dracula VS Theme

This popular dark theme is available on over 200 platforms, published by Zeno Rocha and Derek Sifford. The theme features complementary bright pink, purple, and orange tones.

Image Dracula Visual Studio Theme
Dracula theme displayed in Visual Studio

Eva VS Theme

This theme, published by Justin Lu, features muted colors that are enjoyable and easy on the eyes for those who like these tones. Eva comes in two versions, Light and Dark.

Image Eva Light Visual Studio Theme
Eva Light theme displayed in Visual Studio

Deepdark Material VS Theme

The Deepdark Material theme, published by Onur, is one of the darkest themes in the collection. The quiet colors means that the greens and reds really stand out when coding.

Image DeepDark Material Visual Studio Theme
DeepDark Material theme displayed in Visual Studio

Yonce VS Theme

Yonce, published by Mina Markham, features bright pinks and purples on a dark background. The palette could help your code “pop” a little more off the page.

Image Yonce Visual Studio Theme
Yonce theme displayed in Visual Studio

Visual Studio Theme Pack

The following themes are included in a Visual Studio Theme Pack, where we have converted the default Visual Studio Code themes to work in Visual Studio. Once you install the theme pack, you will see all of these themes!

Image Visual Studio Theme Pack

Visual Studio Theme Pack
Collage of themes inside the Visual Studio Theme Pack

 

This represents a just a small subset of the creativity theme authors have on display. You can find an ever-growing set of additional themes here. We are working on improving how authors can create Visual Studio themes. Stay tuned for updates!

The Theme Converter is still in an experimental stage and we are working closely with the community to refine the new themes. If you have any suggestions for changes or requests, please create an issue on the Theme Converter GitHub.

To install a theme, visit any of the above links, then select the “Download” button on the theme page, and you will be prompted to install the theme file. These themes are most compatible with Visual Studio 2022.

Switching themes in Visual Studio
Switching themes in Visual Studio

To view your theme after installation, you will need to restart your instance of Visual Studio. Then, navigate to the Tools -> Themes dropdown. This list of themes will include the name of your newly installed theme. Select that theme to apply it to Visual Studio.

Try the themes in Visual Studio!

This new theming capability makes Visual Studio more flexible than ever. We’re on a journey to help developers like you make the IDE yours. We encourage you to try these themes in the new Preview!

Want to convert your own VS Code theme?

If you are a theme author and you are interested in converting your own theme to work in Visual Studio 2022, we’d like to invite you to try the Theme Converter tool to help you do this! Take a look at the tool and how you can try it yourself, here.

The tool is in one of its initial iterations and convert themes that are most compatible with C# and C++. We’re keen to hear what you think! If you find an issue, please feel free to share it on the GitHub repo.

Grace Taylor Product Manager

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30 comments

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  • David Cuccia 0

    Very nice! Thanks!

    • Grace TaylorMicrosoft employee 0

      Thank you, David!

  • Praveen Potturu 0

    Biggest problem with community built themes is they get outdated as soon as a new feature gets implemented and puts the IDE in a bad state visually. It’s anything being done to fix that?

    • Giordano De Franceschi 0

      You already know that nobody will answer this question 😀

    • Grace TaylorMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi there! We’re making efforts to consolidate the VS UI so that new themes don’t have to “catch up” to new features. There have been a lot of tokens created in VS over the years, and we think that if new features can use existing elements where it makes sense, then the new themes wouldn’t get outdated, or at least need retouching less often. The Theme Converter tool is also Open Source, so anyone who is interested can feel free to request or contribute changes that they would like to see!

  • 彭伟 0

    Missing transparency theme

    • Jacob McDowell 0

      No HotDogStand either, shame ! 😭 Guess i’ll have to try out that converter…

    • Giordano De Franceschi 0

      There is a Transparent Theme in this page but… it’s transparent.

  • MgSam 0

    Is there a classic blue VS theme? For a few years I used the color theme extension to have a green VS. These days, the default dark mode with R#’s additional syntax highlighting is fine for me.

  • Chuck Ryan 0

    Forget the colors… we need a way to include icon packs in our themes so we do not have to keep trying to adapt to whatever design fetish the current icon team members ascribe to this release, or the next, or the next…

    • Grace TaylorMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi there! Thank you for sharing your input. Please feel free to create a ticket on DevCom to describe including icon packs the themes, so that the feedback can be prioritized!

  • Will Fuqua 0

    For these dark themes, is there a way to set the color palette of the Visual Studio integrated terminal? It appears to use a color palette built for light themes, so the text is very hard to read on a dark background. In Windows Terminal or conhost, you can set the color palette.

    See https://imgur.com/hdizObj for an example.

    • Grace TaylorMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi, Will! Thanks for letting us know about this issue. The text does look hard to read on the dark background. We can look into the issue to see what’s going on. The themes have fallback colors, so at the very least, the text should be readable. Thanks for trying the custom themes!

    • Grace TaylorMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Will, we looked into this issue and it turns out that this is caused by a bug on the Visual Studio platform. We’ve filed an internal bug report so that it can get prioritized and we’re looking into a fix. Thank you for letting us know about this issue!

      • Will Fuqua 0

        That’s great! Really appreciate you looking into it, thanks.

  • Stevie White (Dragnilar) 0

    Aww, my Dark Green Theme didn’t make it in there.

    But in all fairness, these look like they had a lot more work put into them. 😅

    More importantly though, I’m always glad to see Microsoft put out extensions like this one. Much appreciated! 🙂

    • Grace TaylorMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi, Stevie! This post outlines the launch of the new theme converter experience, so all of the themes shared here have been converted from VS Code to work in VS. We linked to all of the themes on the Marketplace and it looks like your Dark Green Theme is included for VS 2022! Thank you for creating the Dark Green Theme. The rainbow indents look really unique and could be quite useful for many folks! It’s creative and it’s great that you could get these results using the two tools.

  • Jon Miller 0

    Are you ever going to add a dark theme to SQL Management Studio?

    • Joseph Palazzo 0

      Try the link below.
      SSMS Dark Theme isn’t perfect but it should keep the brightness from burning your retinas on those late night code banging sessions.

      PS CommandLet to Enable Dark SSMS Theme

  • Mystery Man 0

    My God, you do an amazing job, VS Team! 😘 I was wishing for such themes a couple of months ago. 😍

    If only Windows 10’s developers were like you…

    • Grace TaylorMicrosoft employee 0

      Thank you for your support! We appreciate it. If you’ve had a chance to give the themes a try, please feel free to share your thoughts!

  • Lachlan Picking 0

    Once upon a time, you used to be able to assign different themes to different installations of VS on the same machine. I used to use it for making it more clear which version of VS I was using at a glance. I seem to remember some MSFT folks (probably Scott Hanselman or someone) doing the same thing while demoing preview builds. It bugs me that you can’t seem to do this any more. Is there some setting somewhere that can stop the theme syncing between side-by-side installations? Maybe it’s an account sync thing? If so, I don’t necessarily want to stop syncing all settings, just the theme.

    • Grace TaylorMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Lachlan, thanks for bringing this up. There isn’t an official way to stop the theme from applying to different instances of VS on the same machine currently, but we’ve heard that some users have installed different custom themes on different versions of VS, and because that specific theme wasn’t installed on the other version, it didn’t share. That allows some users to differentiate VS installs by theme. We are investigating how the syncing process can become more intuitive, and whether selecting groups of settings may make sense in certain scenarios. Thanks for sharing this feedback!

  • Waitly Wang 0

    I feel that there are many, many dark themes; But there were so few bright themes that I had to use the default bright theme

    • Grace TaylorMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Waitly, it does seem that there are many dark themes and just a few light themes. There are a couple in the Visual Studio Theme Pack. We’re also working on making it easier to create your own themes, please stay tuned!

  • Steven Maillet 0

    What about themes developed with the VS them designer for VS2019. Sadly that extensions wasn’t updated to VS2022 and tweaking the manifest to support VS2022 lands me with a failure:

    10/31/2021 10:37:37 AM - Microsoft VSIX Installer
10/31/2021 10:37:37 AM - -------------------------------------------
10/31/2021 10:37:37 AM - vsixinstaller.exe version:
10/31/2021 10:37:37 AM - 17.0.5226-preview5
10/31/2021 10:37:37 AM - -------------------------------------------
10/31/2021 10:37:37 AM - Command line parameters:
10/31/2021 10:37:37 AM - C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\resources\app\ServiceHub\Services\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Setup.Service\VSIXInstaller.exe,C:\Users\[[USERNAME]]\Documents\Visual Studio 2019\Projects\[[THEME NAME]]\bin\Release\[[THEME NAME]].vsix
10/31/2021 10:37:37 AM - -------------------------------------------
10/31/2021 10:37:37 AM - Microsoft VSIX Installer
10/31/2021 10:37:37 AM - -------------------------------------------
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - Initializing Install...
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - Extension Details...
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	Identifier         : [[THEME NAME]]
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	Name               : [[THEME NAME]]
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	Author             : [[USERNAME]]
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	Version            : 2.0
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	Description        : [[THEME NAME]] Visual Studio Theme
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	Locale             : en-US
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	MoreInfoURL        : 
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	InstalledByMSI     : False
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	SupportedFrameworkVersionRange : [4.5,)
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	SignatureState     : Unsigned
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	Supported Products : 
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 		Microsoft.VisualStudio.Community
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 			Version : [16.0,18.0)
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 			ProductArchitecture : notSpecified
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	References         : 
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	Prerequisites      : 
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 		-------------------------------------------------------
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 		Identifier   : Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.CoreEditor
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 		Name         : Visual Studio core editor
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 		Version      : [16.0,18.0)
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - Signature Details...
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 	Extension is not signed.
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - 
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - Searching for applicable products...
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - Found installed product - Global Location
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - Found installed product - Visual Studio Community 2022 Preview
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - Found installed product - Visual Studio Community 2019
10/31/2021 10:37:38 AM - VSIXInstaller.NoApplicableSKUsException: This extension is not installable on any currently installed products.
   at VSIXInstaller.ExtensionService.GetInstallableDataImpl(IInstallableExtension extension, String extensionPackParentName, Boolean isRepairSupported, IStateData stateData, IEnumerable`1& skuData)
   at VSIXInstaller.ExtensionService.GetInstallableData(String vsixPath, String extensionPackParentName, Boolean isRepairSupported, IStateData stateData, IEnumerable`1& skuData)
   at VSIXInstaller.ExtensionPackService.IsExtensionPack(IStateData stateData, Boolean isRepairSupported)
   at VSIXInstaller.ExtensionPackService.ExpandExtensionPackToInstall(IStateData stateData, Boolean isRepairSupported)
   at VSIXInstaller.App.Initialize(Boolean isRepairSupported)
   at VSIXInstaller.App.Initialize()
   at System.Threading.Tasks.Task`1.InnerInvoke()
   at System.Threading.Tasks.Task.Execute()

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