Friday, January 11, 2008

I absolutely love trying out different Visual Studio color schemes. I've used John Lam's port of Vibrant for a while as well as some of Tomas Restrapo's VS themes and they're all great. After watching this VIM screencast from the Eleutian guys, I decided to give VIM another try. I'm not able to fly with it yet, but I am picking it up a lot better.

One of the things that I absolutely love about VIM as well as E-TextEditor is how it comes preloaded with some great color schemes. Not only that, but both editors are ridiculously easy to pull down new schemes from the internet. I've never really cared for editing the colors in Visual Studio, but I decided that I had to try to port Wombat over to Visual Studio. It is the theme that Aaron is using in the video and it looks great.

Here is what it looks like in VIM:

gvimwombat

Here is what my port looks like:

vswombat

As you can tell, some of the colors don't exactly match up; however, I think it keeps the overall feel and I like it. Try it out and let me know what you think. If you'd like to make some improvements, make them and then send me a copy!

Download my attempt at a Visual Studio Wombat theme (VS2005).
Download my attempt at a Visual Studio Wombat theme (VS2008).

Thursday, January 17, 2008 6:06:35 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Very nice! These settings look very good on my system.

Not a full-time VS user - is there a way to get the side panels (Solution/Server/Team Explorers) to use the same background for a consistent look?

Now I just have to get UltraEdit Wombatted.
Matt
Thursday, January 17, 2008 10:25:51 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
I'm glad you like the theme!

About the side panels, I don't know if those are customizable or not - about the only panels I've ever customized to be dark are the Immediate/Output/Find windows. If I were to guess, I would say that the side panels are likely getting their color information from Windows. If you were to install a Windows theme using a patched uxtheme.dll (there are lots of themes at http://www.customize.org) that had a dark background, it would likely make the side panels dark as well. I'm just guessing here, though :-)

If you do manage to get an Ultra-Edit version up and running, I'd be interested in that! If I get one going first, I'll post it as well. I've been spending more time in Notepad++ than Ultra-Edit lately, though.
Friday, January 18, 2008 12:42:28 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
>If you do manage to get an Ultra-Edit version up and running, I'd be interested in that!

UltraEdit is going to be more difficult than I thought (to share). It appears that some colors are global (Advanced->Configuration->Editor Display-> Miscellaneous), but most are defined in the Syntax Highlighting section per language as defined in your Wordfile. There does not appear to be the concept of a "Theme". This allows more customization, but makes it harder to share settings. I will send you my uedit32.ini file to experiment with when done.

>I've been spending more time in Notepad++ than Ultra-Edit lately, though.

I had been looking into Notepad++, then Programmer's Notepad as a no-cost alternative lately. The latter does have files containing color presets, but the upcoming changes in UE v14 as described on their website just might convince me to pay for another upgrade.




Matt
Comments are closed.