ReSharper color identifiers screw up with Visual Studio 2012 dark theme

Question

We're experiencing an annoying problem issues with ReSharper's color identifiers feature when Visual Studio 2012 is set to the built-in dark theme.

With ReSharper's color identifiers disabled, the code looks fine:

Then, we enable ReSharper's color identifiers:

And now the code is completly unreadable:

The curious thing, on a colleague's machine, the same code, with the same Visual Studio and ReSharper settings... looks right:

We tried reinitializing both Visual Studio and ReSharper settings, disabling add-ons and extensions and other voodoos to no avail.

Here are our setups:

• My add-ins - His add-ins
• My extensions - His extensions
• My system informations - His system informations

Kelp

Have you tried changing the Visual Studio colour scheme to a light one and then back to the dark one? – Recommendation

@PiersMyers yes, to no avail. – Kelp

Answer 1

By diffing our system information, I noticed three add-ins I had my colleague didn't (JetBrains TeamCity Addin 7.1, VisualSVN 3.0.5 and Git Extensions).

Trying to disable them one by one I found out the culprit is the add-in for TeamCity: as soon as I uninstalled it (it's not reported in Visual Studio, and you can't disable it) the color scheme fixed itself.

The funny thing is both ReSharper and the TeamCity add-ins are provided by JetBrains.

Kelp

Did you report this issue to JetBrains? – Cumuliform

@DmitryOsinovskiy it seems they already know, I still have to try the latest version of the add-in. – Kelp

Answer 2

I had this same problem with vs2013 and resharper 8. I was able to fix by following these steps:

1. Close all Visual Studio instances
2. Open C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio {VS version}\Common7\IDE\Extensions\extensions.configurationchanged file
3. Type anything there
4. Save the file
5. Open VS and check Fonts and Colors in Tools | Options | Environment

source http://resharper-support.jetbrains.com/entries/26859128-ReSharper-Fonts-Colors-settings-do-not-appear-in-Visual-Studio-after-installation

Dill

This worked also for other problems with messed-up colors. Thanks! – Fenrir

Using Visual Studio 2013 with Resharper 10 and this worked for me! – Carvel

Instead of modifying extensions.configurationchanged (which requires elevation), you can also run devenv /updateconfiguration, an undocumented command which does the same thing – Beyer

@IgalTabachnik your comment was hidden and I didn't read it. Else I would have tried instead of doing what's suggested in this answer. – Epidermis

Answer 3

I had the same problem too in VS2013, unfortunately editing the configurationchanged file didn't work for me. However I fixed it by doing the following:

1. deleting the following registry key:

   HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0_Config

2. Run devenv /ResetSettings from VS 2013 admin command prompt

Banebrudge

same here, albireo's fix didnt work, but this one did – Musick

This worked for me as well. I skipped step 1 and executed step 2 from the Start Menu's "Run" panel. Colors....my pretty colors! – Land

This seems to be a simpler way than the others although I had to rearrange all settings, such as locations of windows in VS – Academy

Answer 4

It is a known bug in TeamCity Addin installer. It was fixed in 7.1.5 version. Please, look at related issue in our tracker and 7.1.5 release notes.

Igneous

Answer 5

I use a custom dark theme in Visual Studio 2010 and probably about 75% of the time when I first open a solution up, ReSharper 7.1.1 does exactly the same thing as in your "unreadable" image. I mean, the colors look exactly like that.

I have tested this across several computers with no plug-ins except ReSharper, and with various other plug-ins and no matter what, I get this all of the time. I do not have TeamCity Addin at all and never have.

Anyway, in case anyone is looking for a solution, this fixes it: Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts & Colors > Ok. That's it. Even no changes causes it to refresh and display properly. I can't prevent it, but this fixes it and is the first step I do pretty much every time I open VS2010.

Hope this helps someone.

Artur

Answer 6

I use VS2013 and had the same problem. In my case the culprit was the PowerShell Tools extension, after uninstalling it the color scheme went back to a sane state.

Diarmuid