Personalize the Visual Studio IDE

You can personalize Visual Studio in various ways to best support your own development style and requirements. This topic briefly describes different personalizations and where to find more information.

Additional options are also exposed through the Environment Options Dialog Box. Furthermore, many of your settings roam with you across Visual Studio instances. See Synchronized Settings.

Window layouts

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. 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, choose Environment > General, and change the Color theme option.

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.

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

You can change the main menu casing between Title Case (such as "File") and ALL CAPS ("FILE"). Type "environment" in QuickLaunch, select Environment > General, and change the Apply title case styling to menu bar option.

See Also

Visual Studio IDE