Making VS2012 Tolerable

At first glance, I was mortified with the new VS2012, look and feel. After spending two weeks using it, I have grown to like many of the features; however, there are a couple of key things you need to do to get past the ugly UI.

First disable the capitalization of the menu names. I've been using computers and internet services, since the early 90's, TELNETTing into various MUDS. The idea that using ALL CAPS, is like screaming at someone has been beaten into my head. Let's get out the duct tape, and silence VS. There is a registry hack documented on stackoverflow.

The second thing is to install the Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor. You can get this from the Extensions and Updates option in the now quiet Tools menu. This tool makes it easy to modify the colors, and has a great theme, Dark with Light Editor in it, which I have found to be rather effective. The darkness of the other windows hides a lot of the less important details helping me focus and narrow in on the editor.


Edit

The registry hack still works for VS2013. Just change the path to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\General