I should add that the only problem with using non-proportional fonts is that you can’t vertically align text using spaces but this is really only a small price to pay. Text strings are fundamentally one dimensional not two, and besides, we’re coders not ascii artists.
Replace “non-proportional” with “proportional”. Doh!
Yes, now with 36% more CodeRush! Question. Do you really program in 16 point Lucida Console?
Monospaced fonts are better suited for programming (imo).
With verdana all the text will look compressed to the left. and Spaces/Tabs won’t look “properly” aligned. At least that’s my impresion.
For what is worth, here’s mine:
http://www.newsforge.com.ar/images/vbide.PNG
I use Proggy and have ReShaper, which allows me to set colours with much more granularity. 
Since I have two screens, all the toolbars/palettes are floating on the other screen.
Ah, here’s how to import/export IDE environment settings:
http://blogs.msdn.com/vbide/archive/2005/09/20/471684.aspx
Tools | Import and Export Settings Wizard
Good topic. It is interesting to see how poeple have changed from the default settings.
Here’s mine:
I use Eclipse with a monospaced font (Andale Mono) and lighter text on a dark background (rgb: 236, 233, 216). Spending large amounts of time in an editor with black on white text leaves me reeling from something akin to snowblindness at the end of the day.
Here’s mine:
a href="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~akkartik/feed.cgi?desktop.html"http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~akkartik/feed.cgi?desktop.html/a
Things to note:
Screen space good, widgets bad
Keyboard good, mouse bad
Dark good, light bad
modd veeery good
a href="http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts"http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts/a
Also wanted to chime in on the white text on black thing being very evil (I believe that someone else mentioned this earlier) thing. I use a dark background but the foreground colors are generally muted pastels, so that there’s contrast but I’m not being blasted in the face by the characters on my screen.
Reading Will Shipley’s blog* for example, makes me feel like a fruit fly orbiting a 100W light bulb.
I’m not being blasted in the face by the characters on my screen
That’s some powerful imagery
The whole white-on-black vs. black-on-white debate is really a red herring. They are roughly equal in legibility… DEPENDING ON THE CONTRAST LEVEL. That’s supported by the few bits of research I found on this topic:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000340.html
I do think black on white is somewhat superior, but that may just be because I wear glasses. I get halation effects from high contrast white-on-black schemes, much more so than high contrast black-on-white schemes…
and use Magenta for identifiers
You mean Maroon there, right?
Thanks
Some good attempts. But none is as thoroughly customized as this! It took a surprising amount of effort to set up…
a href="http://www.tomseddon.plus.com/files/Image2.jpg"http://www.tomseddon.plus.com/files/Image2.jpg/a
I just noticed that the rationale was mandatory.
My rationale is unexciting. There’s no real reason for everything being the same colour; I did this after Visual Assist and Visual Studio stopped seeing eye to eye in the syntax colouring department. Rather than have random colours (including white on white), I switched it all off.
Thanks to the Stockholm Syndrome, I now really like it. It also impresses the casual passer-by.
my setup goes back years and years and the prefs that i would always use in qedit and in DOS …
it is lean mean and mostly yellow and green
What’s up with everyone having line numbers enabled? It LOOKS like C# in most of the screenshots but i feel like i’m reading QBASIC again!
and ugh you people all code without Visual Assist? I pity each and every one of you, not to mention the horrible color schemes everyone has picked out, i think everyone here spends too much time looking at MySpace profiles gone wrong, with color schemes made in the spirit of the infamous HOTDOG theme in Windows 3.1 HAHAHA! The only one that IMHHHHHO seems to make any sense was from Gryzor… and he mentions using 2 screens, KUDOS! Thats how coding should be, one screen with code, other screen with all those crappy output/debug windows + toolbars that nobody clicks on because we all use shortcut keys anyways
i’d post a screenshot but i just reinstalled my OS again (without exporting my settings, again) and everything’s still in horrible default coloring, though admittedly with even the Visual Assist defaults on a white background things still look considerably more pleasant than Jeff’s article “Code Colorizing and Readability”
Neat post, but the link to Leon Breedt’s blog is dead. I’d love to find a download for that funky purple/white on gray theme pictured!
Does anyone know where to find this?
This would be nice; I was thinking the same thing. There’s no UI for exporting/importing IDE color schemes from VS.NET much less browsing them. Hmm, if only someone would write that…The icing on the cake for that settings export / import tool would be to grab the font names and bundle or embed them as well.I should add that the only problem with using non-proportional fonts is that you can’t vertically align text using spaces but this is really only a small price to pay. Text strings are fundamentally one dimensional not two, and besides, we’re coders not ascii artists.
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The icing on the cake for that settings export / import tool would be to grab the font names and bundle or embed them as well.
It would be cool if VS supported Font Embedding, like a lot of other Microsoft products and web browsers do. Not at the document level (that would just be weird), but at the settings level.