Years ago there was a TV news anchor in Chicago that had a habit of emphasizing every single WORD!
I was annoyed by her delivery because, of course, emphasizing every word is the same as emphasizing no words. Only much more tedious.
I feel Visual Studio 2019 commits the same sin with its additional syntax highlighting colors.
I’m sorry, that’s just too many words emphasized with too many colors. Visual Studio provides numerous ways to determine syntactical meaning of code words, such as a tooltip window that appears when hovering the mouse cursor over a word, F12 navigation to variable definitions, and Intellisense. Additional colors, in my opinion, do not add meaning. Instead, they distract the programmer with visual noise.
If you wish to revert to the simpler syntax highlighting colors used by Visual Studio 2017, click…
Tools > Options > Text Editor > C# > Advanced > Classifications
…and uncheck “Use enhanced colors for C# and Basic.”
Much better.
Thank you! The extra colors were driving me crazy.
Thanks!!
I disagree with your premise, the additional colors help visual distinguish parts of code that do different things.
But I appreciate you writing this because you helped me figure out how to turn it back on when an update reverted this on me.
Glad my post helped you. To each their own!
It’s very much dependent on the person. I’ve never found the color to be distracting or noisy, that claim seems odd to me infact… But i’ve also grown up using editors that color things for me. And when you deal with stuff like gcode, color undeniably makes life SO much nicer when you can quickly see where things are in the code by filtering by color. Your you dont need to read, and your eyes dont even need to be focused yet you can can see the structure of a whole block of code, without color and reading the best you have is the position and length of words in each line. Suffice to say, if you can learn to visually filter by color (like you do with some games infact, so it’s a trainable skill), you can actually spend more time looking at what you’re interested in. So to me, it removes the noise. But of course, I accept not everyone is like me and that is not the case for all.
As of October 2020, the Classifications option is no longer available; Not sure after which update (def not 16.7.6). Still, you can find under
Tools > Options > Text Editor > C# > Advanced > Editor Color Schemethe option to revert to 2017 settings, which does the same thing.Thanks for the update, Eric. You are correct. I see the Editor Color Scheme option in my up-to-date Visual Studio IDE (version 16.7.6) right where you said it would be.