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Editor themes in Visual Studio for Mac

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Important

Visual Studio for Mac was retired on August 31, 2024 in accordance with Microsoft’s Modern Lifecycle Policy. While you can continue to work with Visual Studio for Mac, there are several other options for developers on Mac such as the preview version of the new C# Dev Kit extension for VS Code.

Learn more about support timelines and alternatives.

Editor themes can be changed to any of the 10 color schemes provided by default in Visual Studio for Mac via the Visual Studio > Preferences > Text Editor > Color Themes menu options:

Color Theme Selection

In box themes are not user accessible at this time as they're embedded within the IDE as resources. You can definitely add themes or use themes you find elsewhere as a scaffold to make your own theme. There's no UI to create new or edit existing themes. The default editor theme is tied to whether the user picked the dark or light IDE theme. You can't change the colors without using themes. You can take a theme file and modify it or create a brand new one.

Adding new themes

New color themes can be added, provided they are in one of the supported formats:

  • Visual Studio (.vssettings)
  • Xamarin Studio (.json)
  • TextMate (.tmTheme)

Once you have found or created a new theme and downloaded it to your local machine, add it by doing the following steps:

  1. Select the Add button on the Color Themes Option dialog: Color Theme Add
  2. Browse for the theme on your local machine and press Open.
  3. The theme is added to the bottom of the pre-installed list of themes. To preview the theme, select it: Color Theme Preview
  4. To apply the theme, press the Okay button.