Personalizing the Visual Studio IDE

This section describes how to personalize Visual Studio in various ways to best support your own development style and requirements. You can define and save multiple window layouts and switch between them. For example, you can define a layout for coding and one for debugging. You can customize colors, fonts and formatting in the code editor for each language. You can choose between the blue, dark or light environment color themes, or you can create custom themes by downloading and installing the Visual Studio theme editor from the Visual Studio Code Gallery. Many other options are also exposed through the Environment Options Dialog Box.

Many of your settings roam with you across Visual Studio instances. See Synchronized Settings for more information.

Window layouts

To arrange window positions and behavior, and save custom layouts, see Customizing window layouts.

General environment options

To customize many environment settings, type environment in QuickLaunch. When the property page appears, you can press F1 for more help on the various settings on that page. See also Environment Options Dialog Box.

External tools

To customize which external tools appear in menus and toolbars, see Managing External Tools.

Start page

To create a custom start page for you and your team, see Customizing the Start Page

Environment color themes

To change the color theme between light, dark and blue, type environment in QuickLaunch and choose Environment | General. To change colorization options in the editor, type environment in QuickLaunch and choose Environment | Fonts and Colors. see also How to: Change Fonts and Colors.

Menus and toolbars

To add or remove menu or toolbar items, see How to: Customize Menus and Toolbars.

Main menu casing

Due to popular demand, you can change the main menu casing between Title Case and ALL CAPS by typing environment in QuickLaunch and choosing Environment | General.

See Also

Visual Studio IDE