Overriding Intellisense colors in Visual Studio 2015

Question

I'm using the Light theme with custom Text Editor colors. In Visual Studio 2015, my Intellisense and the other lightbulb/hover/popups all have code colors to match the Text Editor settings.

That sounds nice, but the Light theme has a very light gray background, and I prefer a white foreground color for Plain Text in the editor. It ends up like this:

From my investigation so far...

In previous versions of Visual Studio, this colorized Intellisense feature came from a Productivity Power Tools add-in. It could be turned off. That's not installed. It's built into Visual Studio now, and I couldn't find a place to turn it off.

I really don't want to mess with the theme editor. I just want black text Intellisense, or to at least turn the white text to black in the popups. Others have said it doesn't work with Intellisense, but I'm not sure.

I have set Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors > Editor Tooltip > Plain Text foreground color to black. That's why the words under the code are black. But that doesn't affect the code reference itself.

Lookthrough

Answer 1

I have this same issue, as I use a dark blue background with light text.

What I did was use this add-on:

https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/6f4b51b6-5c6b-4a81-9cb5-f2daa560430b

Then copy the theme you are currently using, but do not switch to it yet (if you want to keep your current font / color settings).

I then exported my "Font and Color" settings, opened the generated file, and removed the "Theme" XML element completely.

You can then switch to the new copied theme and re-import your color settings from the file just created using "Import and Export Settings".

Then go to the theme editor add-on under Tools > Customize Colors. Edit your theme. Select the "Show All Elements" option and search for "tooltip" in the *.theme file. Update the Editor Tooltip -> Plain Text -> Foreground to be bright, and the Environment -> ToolTip to be dark.

It isn't a perfect solution, but it is usable until they fix it.

Stutsman

I love you. This has saved me hours of agony. I was trying to customise my imported 2013 theme and was going through the options one at a time. This is terrible as there is no apply button or live preview so you can't see your changes without exiting out of it. Using this theme editor with show all turned on is brilliant! – Brochette

Answer 2

@karoberts answer is good although with the Visual Studio 2015 Color Theme Editor already installed I had to

• Update the Editor Tooltip -> Plain Text -> Foreground to be bright, and the Environment -> ToolTip to be dark
• apply the theme
• restart Visual Studio (otherwise it wouldn't take the background)

But exporting/importing as in @karoberts answer was not necessary.

Organology

Some changes to the Font & colour doesn't need a restart but some changes (like intellisense tooltip) needed a restart to reflect the changes. – Laodicea

In VS 2017 I had to re-open the current document to see the effect on the tooltip, or to open a new document to see it. – Jerusalem

Answer 3

Try this
tools > options > fonts and colors > show settings for "Enviroment" > tooltip > item background

Beene