The Dark Side of Visual Studio

Just an apology; I know that the title is really misleading. What we are discussing here is the IDE setup with black background and white text. There is a debate going on in this topic - some people believe that black text in white background is better and others say that white text in black background is better. I belong to the second group (this opinion is purely personal). I used to spend lot of time in front of the machine each day, and by GOD's grace, till now I don't have any problem with my eye. I believe that one of the reasons is my desktop/application settings. I prefer to use less brightness and gray background for desktop. For development tools such as VS .NET and NetBeans (with which I spend lot of hours each day) I use the black background. I also heard that black background is useful when you work with laptops because it consumes less power; but I am not sure about this argument.

Coming back to the dark side, you can find more information from the below link.

http://weblogs.asp.net/infinitiesloop/archive/2006/08/06/Join-the-Dark-Side-of-Visual-Studio.aspx

I made changes to the theme. I use BitStream Vera Sans Mono as the default font. I often switch to Consolas also; not a bad choice at all. For the output window, Dina font is used. The updated dark side settings that I use is uploaded and you can try it, if you are interested (you should download & install the fonts mentioned previously, before applying the settings). Here is the link:

http://giri.tp.googlepages.com/TheDarkSide_Updated.vssettings

Import this settings from Tools -> Import and Export Settings -> Import selected environment settings. The wizard will give you an option to save the current settings, before applying the new one. Save the current settings and you can use it to restore the previous settings, if you really want to.