<a href="https://seizethedave.com/etc/ide-color.gif">https://seizethedave.com/etc/ide-color.gif</a>;

I just like my fall/spring poppy colors.

And that's Proggy Clean, which rocks the mouse.

I use Vim with the 'desert' colorscheme:

<a href="https://rix0r.nl/~one/share/shot-20051014.215707.gif">https://rix0r.nl/~one/share/shot-20051014.215707.gif</a>;

I think that 'light on dark' schemes are easier on the eye than 'dark on light': less screen area that's radiating intense light.

And Proggy Clean of course. Although I must say, Vera Sans Mono looks appealing too...

I'm supposed to be billing but instead I'm playing with my color scheme. I feel like such an interior decorator, but only in an IDE.

So how do I get Proggy?

First off, this is a great post. Leon's scheme is quite nice. The biggest issue is that you might only see part of someone color scheme, not the whole thing. Though a good hint about ones scheme, the whole pie it is not.

Now please note, I am not saying that these screenshots are a disservice (they are definitely not!), but it would be nice if the appropriate color codes were listed for each textual element associated with your IDE.

Another major issue is then setting up your IDE to conform to the described color conventions. Thus I propose the following application, an app that:

1) Scrapes your IDE for a specific color scheme, converting it into an XML file, and thus allowing you to email/post that file to whomever you want.
2) In turn the same application can load another persons XML color scheme and set it appropriately in the IDE.
** Note: of course making this app cross ide compatible would be quite a feat, so maybe one IDE at a time is ones best bet (please make it Visual Studio first ;) ).

Cheers,
Pete

> So how do I get Proggy?

Tsk, tsk.. just click the proggy link in the font entry!

https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000157.html

> Thus I propose the following application

This would be nice; I was thinking the same thing. There's no UI for exporting/importing IDE color schemes from VS.NET much less browsing them. Hmm, if only someone would write that..

<a href="https://onlysyntax.blogspot.com/2005/01/example-of-nest-shading.html">https://onlysyntax.blogspot.com/2005/01/example-of-nest-shading.html</a>;

<a href="https://onlysyntax.blogspot.com/2005/01/nest-shading-ive-been-playing-with-c.html">https://onlysyntax.blogspot.com/2005/01/nest-shading-ive-been-playing-with-c.html</a>;

<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/carlmanaster/9322576/">https://www.flickr.com/photos/carlmanaster/9322576/</a>;

<a href="https://www.eclipse-plugins.info/eclipse/plugin_details.jsp;jsessionid=663F6B99AC132EEC19299200F3C6E571?id=558">https://www.eclipse-plugins.info/eclipse/plugin_details.jsp;jsessionid=663F6B99AC132EEC19299200F3C6E571?id=558</a>;

Screenshot
Discussion

Yet another screenshot

These aren't production IDEs, just ideas I was exploring. The second screenshot suggests what an IDE could look like if it and the language were designed to be testing all the time - like David Saff's Automated Continuous Testing for Eclipse, which I must try sometime.

(I tried inlining the links, but failed.)

While not perfect, VS 2005 does let you import/export settings. I think that the settings are serialized as XML - if that's the case, then I'm sure that it would be possible to find the color related settings from that file and post only those. Of course, I'm not exactly sure what happens when you import only a subset of all the settings exposed by VS....

It's better than nothing, though.

The icing on the cake for that settings export / import tool would be to grab the font names and bundle or embed them as well.

It would be cool if VS supported Font Embedding, like a lot of other Microsoft products and web browsers do. Not at the document level (that would just be weird), but at the settings level.

this is a screenshot from my visual studio .net ide:

<a href="https://img366.imageshack.us/img366/396/codinghorror6yc.jpg">https://img366.imageshack.us/img366/396/codinghorror6yc.jpg</a>;

Ah, here's how to import/export IDE environment settings:

https://blogs.msdn.com/vbide/archive/2005/09/20/471684.aspx

Tools | Import and Export Settings Wizard

was that a response to my comment (and simultaneously a request for my color settings) or just a info on how to import/export IDE environment settings ?

As far as dark colour schemes go I've always liked the zenburn scheme which is available for vim, emacs and probably more. Here's someone's screenshot here:
<a href="https://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/advweb/build/img/colorscheme/master/zenburn.jpg">https://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/advweb/build/img/colorscheme/master/zenburn.jpg</a>;

Font wise, verdana 8 is a lovely non-proportional font. Non-proportional fonts are much more readable than monospaced fonts and allow more text to fit horizontally on the screen. Aren't monospaced fonts just a throwback to text based displays?

I should add that the only problem with using non-proportional fonts is that you can't vertically align text using spaces but this is really only a small price to pay. Text strings are fundamentally one dimensional not two, and besides, we're coders not ascii artists.

Replace "non-proportional" with "proportional". Doh!

Monospaced fonts are better suited for programming (imo).
With verdana all the text will look compressed to the left. and Spaces/Tabs won't look "properly" aligned. At least that's my impresion.

For what is worth, here's mine:

https://www.newsforge.com.ar/images/vbide.PNG

I use Proggy and have ReShaper, which allows me to set colours with much more granularity. ;)

Since I have two screens, all the toolbars/palettes are floating on the other screen.

Great screenshots guys. Send more! Especially you, Mr. "I love serifs more than I love life itself" Haack.

> Monospaced fonts are better suited for programming (imo). With verdana all the text will look compressed to the left. and Spaces/Tabs won't look "properly" aligned. At least that's my impresion.

Yeah, the alignment argument is a showstopper in favor of monospace. Imagine trying to use Python, where tabs are equivalent to {}, with a proportional font! Hilarity ensues.

> Imagine trying to use Python, where tabs are equivalent to {}, with a proportional font! Hilarity ensues.

Not really. The indentation only matters at the start of the line, and although the width between characters may differ, all spaces will still be the same width. So actually the indentation will still be consistent, even with a proportional font.

Methinks it will look messy though, if the columns aren't nicely aligned. Monospaced fonts are a sine qua non!

Pfft - my code has hard tabs for indenting and all other whitespace is one space. No columns for me! I can run a simple script to translate any code into this format.

What I would love to know, is how to change the color of some (not all) of the windows.

I know that I was watching a video, probably a year ago now, where someone was running through something in Visual Studio. His main code window was the stadard black text on a white background. But his command window was white text on a black background. I haven't been able to figure out how to do this yet.

> I haven't been able to figure out how to do this yet.

Cool idea-- in VS.NET 2005, you can change the fore/back colors for the various tool windows in the "Fonts and Colors" section of the options.

I can't find any equivalent in VS.NET 2003.. the fore/back color selectors are dimmed. Maybe editing the registry?

I write Python in Verdana (which is proportional of course), with no tab/space hilarity.

> with no tab/space hilarity

Well, that depends. We haven't seen your code yet ;)

Here's mine:

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/hanselmanidescreenshot.png

Yes, now with 36% more CodeRush! Question. Do you really program in 16 point Lucida Console?

Good topic. It is interesting to see how poeple have changed from the default settings.

Here's mine:

https://blog.eriklane.com/archive/2005/10/17/2212.aspx

I use Eclipse with a monospaced font (Andale Mono) and lighter text on a dark background (rgb: 236, 233, 216). Spending large amounts of time in an editor with black on white text leaves me reeling from something akin to snowblindness at the end of the day.

Here's mine:
<a href="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~akkartik/feed.cgi?desktop.html">https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~akkartik/feed.cgi?desktop.html</a>;
Things to note:
Screen space good, widgets bad
Keyboard good, mouse bad
Dark good, light bad
modd veeery good
<a href="https://www.jmknoble.net/fonts">https://www.jmknoble.net/fonts</a>;

Also wanted to chime in on the white text on black thing being very evil (I believe that someone else mentioned this earlier) thing. I use a dark background but the foreground colors are generally muted pastels, so that there's contrast but I'm not being blasted in the face by the characters on my screen.

Reading Will Shipley's blog* for example, makes me feel like a fruit fly orbiting a 100W light bulb.

* <a href="https://wilshipley.com/blog/2005/09/unit-testing-is-teh-suck-urr.html">https://wilshipley.com/blog/2005/09/unit-testing-is-teh-suck-urr.html</a>;

> I'm not being blasted in the face by the characters on my screen

That's some powerful imagery ;)

The whole white-on-black vs. black-on-white debate is really a red herring. They are roughly equal in legibility.. DEPENDING ON THE CONTRAST LEVEL. That's supported by the few bits of research I found on this topic:

https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000340.html

I do think black on white is somewhat superior, but that may just be because I wear glasses. I get halation effects from high contrast white-on-black schemes, much more so than high contrast black-on-white schemes..

and use Magenta for identifiers

You mean Maroon there, right?

Thanks

Some good attempts. But none is as thoroughly customized as this! It took a surprising amount of effort to set up...

<a href="https://www.tomseddon.plus.com/files/Image2.jpg">https://www.tomseddon.plus.com/files/Image2.jpg</a>;

I just noticed that the rationale was mandatory.

My rationale is unexciting. There's no real reason for everything being the same colour; I did this after Visual Assist and Visual Studio stopped seeing eye to eye in the syntax colouring department. Rather than have random colours (including white on white), I switched it all off.

Thanks to the Stockholm Syndrome, I now really like it. It also impresses the casual passer-by.

my setup goes back years and years and the prefs that i would always use in qedit and in DOS ...

it is lean mean and mostly yellow and green

https://edlserver.geekgalaxy.com/images/vsidecolors.jpg

What's up with everyone having line numbers enabled? It LOOKS like C# in most of the screenshots but i feel like i'm reading QBASIC again!

and ugh you people all code without Visual Assist? I pity each and every one of you, not to mention the horrible color schemes everyone has picked out, i think everyone here spends too much time looking at MySpace profiles gone wrong, with color schemes made in the spirit of the infamous HOTDOG theme in Windows 3.1 HAHAHA! The only one that IMHHHHHO seems to make any sense was from Gryzor.. and he mentions using 2 screens, KUDOS! Thats how coding should be, one screen with code, other screen with all those crappy output/debug windows + toolbars that nobody clicks on because we all use shortcut keys anyways ;)

i'd post a screenshot but i just reinstalled my OS again (without exporting my settings, again) and everything's still in horrible default coloring, though admittedly with even the Visual Assist defaults on a white background things still look considerably more pleasant than Jeff's article "Code Colorizing and Readability"

Neat post, but the link to Leon Breedt's blog is dead. I'd love to find a download for that funky purple/white on gray theme pictured!

Does anyone know where to find this?