There you have it! I started with Visual Studio’s default settings and configured each and every color one by one. 3 hours later I was finished and satisfied with what I have…but I think it was time well spent considering this is what I’m looking at for >= 8 hours a day.
This was a complete re-do of my previous dark theme. This one is even more colorful than the previous, mainly because Resharper does an amazing job of detecting additional code elements like mutable vs unmutable, or unused code, in additional to many other things.
By the way, you should definitely spend the time to configure your own colors rather than using someone else’s template. The reason being is that each and every person is different, and obviously will have preferences towards different colors. I go through different moods and I’ll tweak the theme to be “blue” or “red” for a period of time.
Another reason why you configure it manually is that it drills into your brain more of what each color represents. If you just used my template you would probably never notice that orange means input parameter, and green is a local variable.
However, one thing you can and should take from this blog post is not to use pure black or pure white as your background (did you notice my current line indicator is darker than my background?). Set your background to (10,10,10) or (245,245,245). Your eyes will thank me.