As a .NET developer, I spend 80% of my time looking at codes in Visual Studio. I find that with Visual Studio’s default theme is too bright and restraints my eyes easily after prolonged used. Thus, I opted to find a custom theme that has soft contrast that easy to look at. You may think that this is not a very important issue, but the longer your eyes to get tired, the more time you get to work productively. Scott Hanselman has a good list of Visual Studio theme in his site, but unfortunately none of them works for me. Most of the Visual Studio themes in the list has dark background (which is a good thing), but I find that the contrast between the text with the background is too vibrant. Those themes are still a lot better than Visual Studio default theme, but I’m looking more on a softer theme, softer dark background with a not too bright text color.

I went on googling around to try to find a better Visual Studio Theme, then I found this Inkpot theme. I find that this theme has a very good color selection. It has grayish black background, instead of going all black. The font color has matte-like looks, and definitely not bright. Its not a perfect theme, but I think its the best to my preference.

Here is how to change your Visual Studio Selected Settings:

• Download the InkPot theme and place it anywhere in your hard-drive.
• On the Tools menu, choose Import and Export Settings.
• On Welcome to the Import and Export Settings Wizard page, click Import selected environment settings and then click Next.
• On the Save Current Settings page, select Yes, save my current settings, and then click Next.
• Browse to the location of your Inkpot theme, select it, and click next.
• Expand the All Settings, Options, Environment Category, and select the Fonts and Colors settings.
• Click Finish.

If you’re working with Visual Studio on regular basis, I highly recommend you to change your theme. Its very important to have a less bright, dark background theme as it goes easy on your eyes. Try out the Inkpot theme, it works great for me. You can read more about how to modify Visual Studio Theme Settings here.

NOTE: this theme is for Visual Studio 2008. Credit to the original poster of the Inkpot theme (sorry I’ve lost the link to your website).

RWendi