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Is there a document or a chart somewhere that translates the thousands (possibly tens of thousands -- who knows!) of controls in the new Visual Studio color theme catastrophe into something recognizable by people who aren't clinically insane?

I have no idea what a "ClassDesignerClassCompartmentKey" is... or a "ProjectDesignerTabSepTopGradientEndKey", or any of the other fifty million unnecessary and unwanted "controls" that have been inflicted on us by the Visual Studio Design Team are.

All I want to do is fix the UI disaster that is Visual Studio 2012, but I don't have a clue where to start. I guess I can download another one of the useless Color Theme addins from the Microsoft Extensions that don't work, but at this point I'm so irritated by the complete lack of functionality in the four (maybe more...) useless addins that I have installed and removed that I'm going to write an application that will take my system desktop colors and brute-force them onto all five hundred billion "theme controls" so that I can go back to using an IDE that doesn't make me want to stab myself in the eyes.

jerhewet
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  • You could take a [look here](http://studiostyl.es/). Perhaps you could find a theme that suits your needs or that requires little rework. – Steve Oct 24 '13 at 21:46
  • possible duplicate of [How can I switch themes in Visual Studio 2012](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9594433/how-can-i-switch-themes-in-visual-studio-2012) –  Oct 24 '13 at 22:12
  • *All I want to do is fix the UI disaster that is Visual Studio 2012* Install Update 3 or whichever one brought the blue theme + turn off the UPPERCASE MENUS + R# => Use Colour Theme and that's the best you can do. – ta.speot.is Oct 24 '13 at 23:55
  • This question does not already have an answer, and it is not a possible duplicate. What I need is documentation that explicitly defines what all of the theme "controls" actually are, and what they actually map to in the user interface. As stated in the original question, a control named "ClassDesignerClassCompartmentKey" is completely meaningless without a lexicon that describes what the control is and where it is located. – jerhewet Oct 25 '13 at 17:15
  • Your question states that you want to write an app to handle the themes. One of the [answers](http://stackoverflow.com/a/12151404/806549) to the question I link to has source code to modify the themes, including code on how to unpack the colors from the registry location. [Another](http://stackoverflow.com/a/18914645/806549) will give you the registry location for them. How is this not a duplicate? –  Oct 26 '13 at 15:39

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If you want to see exactly what is being changed you can use this online theme editor. Go to create a new theme or select an existing one, click on the item that you want to change, it will give you the name that VS uses which you can adjust in the Visual Studio. You can create a theme or import the one that offends you and make alterations and export it out to be used.

Mark Hall
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  • Drat. Close -- and a very, very nice tool! -- but it apparenly only addresses the themes for editing code, and not the themes and controls for the Visual Studio UI. – jerhewet Oct 25 '13 at 17:18
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If you're referring to ways to change the color theme of Visual Studio 2012, Scott Hanselman wrote a good article, Your Colorful Visual Studio 2012 with the Color Theme Editor (VS2010 colors, too). Probably of greatest interest he refers to Matthew Johnson's Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor (a.k.a Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor) which makes it simple to apply prebuilt themes. He also includes the following registry modification to turn off the all-caps feature.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General\SuppressUppercaseConversion REG_DWORD value: 1

LeastOne
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  • Unlike all of the other UI theme editors, Matt Johnson's Color Theme editor comes the closest to getting it right. At least with this tool I've been able to change some of the more annoying defects that none of the other editors address, like always displaying the text in every selection as bright white (TreeView: SelectedItemActive, SelectedItemInactive). – jerhewet Oct 25 '13 at 17:29