On Visual Studio Skins

I’ve been hacking a little Haskell lately and I really like the absolutely slick Leksah IDE. I did especially like the color themes it comes with. Not only does it look great but I also noticed I could work with it for long hours without feeling the usual strain on my eyes.

Inspired by this, I started browsing around if similar color themes are available for Visual Studio, where I do spend most of my time. Visual Studio is easy to customize via the Tools->Options-> Environment->Fonts and Colors dialog. All Settings can be conveniently exported and imported as xml files.

It’s not just about colors but also about fonts. A great resource for comparisons is Scott Hanselmanns blog, as well as stackoverflow. Having worked with XCode a lot for my iRow project, I started to like Monaco a lot, but it’s only available for Mac’s because there are some licensing issues for using it on windows or whatever. I did not really like Lucida Console that was the VS2008 default, but VS2010’s Consolas is a  great font for programming.

The theme I currently use is a remix of the popular Zenburn theme for vim. Luke Sampson has created a great site called studiostyles.info where Visual Studio Themes can be created, shared and voted on.  You can find my current theme there too. Here’s a preview: