Learn how to change from the default theme of Visual Studio Community 2017 to a darker one.

How to change to a dark theme in Visual Studio Community 2017

Visual Studio Community 2017 RC is a free, fully featured, and extensible IDE for individual developers, open source projects, education and academic research. You can create applications for Android, iOS, Windows and the web. This IDE is widely used by .NET developers, that usually as any other developer of other programming languages, have color preferences. By default, Visual Studio ships with a light theme, a color scheme that is absolutely horrible for developers that work in the night.

In this little article, we'll show you quickly how to change the theme of Visual Studio Community 2017 to a darker one.

How to change to a custom theme

To get started, open Visual Studio and access the options in the start page. Go to Tools > Options:

Change Visual Studio Community Color Theme

Then select the Environment view and the General tab:

Select Color Schema of Visual Studio Dark, Light and Blue

Accept the new theme clicking on OK. When you do this, it will took a while to Visual Studio to change definitely the theme. After loading a little bit, you will see your new dark design. There are other themes, like the Blue one:

Visual Studio Blue Design

Happy coding !


Senior Software Engineer at Software Medico. Interested in programming since he was 14 years old, Carlos is a self-taught programmer and founder and author of most of the articles at Our Code World.

Sponsors