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BenevolentDeity-8364 avatar image
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BenevolentDeity-8364 asked BenevolentDeity-8364 commented

How to change Visual Studio 2019 IDE title bar colors for active, inactive, and undocked windows

I am using VS 2019 Community v16.9.5 on Windows 10 Pro 64-bit with the latest updates. Windows and VS are both set to the dark theme and the desktop background on my six monitors is black.

The problem is that the title bars for the main IDE window as well as any additional VS windows that result from undocking a tabbed window is the same color as the background for the rest of the window itself, which is black. This makes it difficult to find the title bars when I want to drag the windows around and I often end up clicking the wrong thing. I often have 10 or more such windows open at a time with some of them overlapping each other.

I know I can change the color of the desktop background or go back to the light themes, but I simply want a way to select specific title bar colors for the active vs. the inactive VS windows. I'm not adverse to registry hacks, but those I've used for active vs. inactive windows in light mode don't seem to work for dark mode.

vs-setup
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TianyuSun-MSFT avatar image
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TianyuSun-MSFT answered BenevolentDeity-8364 commented

Hello @BenevolentDeity-8364 ,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

This extension “Visual Studio Color Theme Designer” may be helpful. (set the color theme for the IDE)

I did some tests, you can try to set Common elements > Main Window > Caption > Active/Inactive > Background option to change the title bar colors. And set Common elements > Tool Window > Caption > Active/Inactive > Background option to change the title bar colors of docked/undocked windows.

After changing, the results will look like following screenshot

97748-image.png

Best Regards,
Tianyu


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Tianyu,

Thank you for your help. I looked at the "Visual Studio Color Theme Editor" extension you mentioned and it seemed like it might do the trick. However, it had some poor reviews and some of the reviewers mentioned its predecessor, the "Color Theme Editor for Visual Studio 2019" extension so I installed it instead. It seems to work well in most respects but the title bar color changes for some reason don't affect the windows resulting from undocking the tabs into separate windows (although the window outline colors do affect them). There may be some hack for this but the versatility this application currently offers is sufficient to make it much easier to deal with multiple windows. I may try the extension you mentioned later just to see if will change the undocked tab windows too :-)

Ray

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SimpleSamples avatar image
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SimpleSamples answered SimpleSamples commented

Does Colors and Styling for Visual Studio help? The UI for that can be accessed using Tools > Options > Fonts and Colors. You can see an image showing it in the User-customizable colors section of that page. Sorry that that page has too much information.



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It looks like there may be an answer somewhere in that document because I did sem a mention of title bars, but its fairly complex and I'll have to spend some time deciphering it. It seems that something as desirable as changing the IDE's title bar colors should be a simple selectable option, but go figure :-( Thank you for your suggestion :-)

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Yes, I got distracted. I have VS 2017 and I wanted to ensure my response is appropriate for VS 2019. I searched and then did not realize that that page is not what I (you) wanted. It might help however with understanding the options.

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