Customizing

Customizing

Everything these themes set is a default. Anything you change yourself wins over it, permanently and per-user.

Changing a colour

Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors.

Pick the display item you want under Display items and set its foreground or background. The names in that list are the Visual Studio classification names — the same ones listed on Color Roles, so that page is the map from "the record colour" to the item you actually need to select.

A few worth knowing:

• class name, interface name, record class name, record struct name, struct name, enum name — the five C# type kinds, separately colourable.
• user members - locals and parameters, user members - fields, user members - properties — the identifiers the variable role paints.
• operator and operator - overloaded — separate items, so you can pull operators back further or push them forward without touching keywords.

Changing weight or slant

Same dialog. Bold is a checkbox next to each display item.

Italic is not exposed there. Visual Studio's Fonts and Colors dialog offers bold only, which is why the italic in these themes comes from a MEF component rather than from the theme file — see Color Roles. To remove an italic you do not want, you would have to disable the extension's emphasis component, which is not separable from the themes themselves.

Scope of a change

Changes in Fonts and Colors are stored per user, not per theme, and they persist across theme switches. If you recolour record class name while using Focus Reactor and then switch to Focus Signal, your colour follows you. To get back to a theme's own value, use Use Defaults in that dialog — note that this resets the whole list, not one item.

Because of the same behaviour, the emphasis component applies under every theme, not only these. Switching to the built-in Dark theme keeps comments italic until you uninstall the extension.

Running both families

Graphite Theme and Focus Themes install as independent extensions and can be installed together. Both ship an emphasis component that exports the same set of classifications, and MEF does not define which one wins when both are present.

It does not matter in practice: both set the same flags to the same values and neither touches the foreground colour, so either resolution order renders identically.

Exporting your own variant

Tools > Import and Export Settings > Export selected environment settings > Fonts and Colors writes a .vssettings file you can keep or share. That captures your customisations on top of whichever theme is active; it is not a theme in its own right, and it will not reproduce the italic, which lives in the extension rather than in the settings.

To build an actual theme variant, see Contributing — the palettes are a table in one file, and adding a direction means adding a row.