Can I recolor Visual Studio 11?

Question

Visual Studio 11's UI is all black and white. Except, that is, for menus added by extensions, two buttons on the Properties window, and the ToolStripContainer icon in the toolbox. (Why that one? No idea.)

Is it possible to get my beloved color back? I understand that this whole color thing has been way over-hyped since they invented in the sixties, but as someone who grew up with it I find myself missing it now.

But in all seriousness, color is a quick visual identifier and makes searching for well-used icons easier than identifying 16x16 black and white shapes. Furthermore, as I said before, extensions add their own colored icons into Visual Studio, and while they fit nicely in VS 2010, they are an eye-sore now.

I found the option to change from 'Light' to 'Dark', but can I please change back to 'Colored', or has Microsoft nixed this for their new Metro-style programs?

Answer 1

They talked about the reasons they moved to the new glyphs in this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/introducing-the-new-developer-experience.aspx

Basically, they did some research and found that people could identify the new icons easier than the old ones. And I would agree. They have now updated the post saying they are listening to feedback on this. So leave a comment with your feelings and be heard.

The comments on that post seem to follow your sentiments, but I personally really like it. I think the only icon I click on in the interface is the "show all files" icon in the solution explorer, so the fact that most of the icons went away is great. And I can tell what the "bookmark" group of icons actually are. The old blue oval didn't mean anything to me.

As with anything, there's a little "who moved my cheese" going on here, but I agree with them. The new colors prevent the IDE from distracting from the code. I remember people really hated the VS 2010 Purple too... so maybe this will all fade away.