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How to change Visual Studio 2019 IDE title bar colors for active, inactive, and undocked windows

BenevolentDeity 21 Reputation points
May 18, 2021, 9:39 PM

I am using VS 2019 Community v16.9.5 on Windows 10 Pro 64-bit with the latest updates. Windows and VS are both set to the dark theme and the desktop background on my six monitors is black.

The problem is that the title bars for the main IDE window as well as any additional VS windows that result from undocking a tabbed window is the same color as the background for the rest of the window itself, which is black. This makes it difficult to find the title bars when I want to drag the windows around and I often end up clicking the wrong thing. I often have 10 or more such windows open at a time with some of them overlapping each other.

I know I can change the color of the desktop background or go back to the light themes, but I simply want a way to select specific title bar colors for the active vs. the inactive VS windows. I'm not adverse to registry hacks, but those I've used for active vs. inactive windows in light mode don't seem to work for dark mode.

Visual Studio Setup
Visual Studio Setup
Visual Studio: A family of Microsoft suites of integrated development tools for building applications for Windows, the web and mobile devices.Setup: The procedures involved in preparing a software program or application to operate within a computer or mobile device.
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  1. Tianyu Sun-MSFT 33,271 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor
    May 19, 2021, 7:19 AM

    Hello @BenevolentDeity ,

    Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

    This extension “Visual Studio Color Theme Designer” may be helpful. (set the color theme for the IDE)

    I did some tests, you can try to set Common elements > Main Window > Caption > Active/Inactive > Background option to change the title bar colors. And set Common elements > Tool Window > Caption > Active/Inactive > Background option to change the title bar colors of docked/undocked windows.

    After changing, the results will look like following screenshot

    97748-image.png

    Best Regards,
    Tianyu

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  1. Sam of Simple Samples 5,546 Reputation points
    May 18, 2021, 10:19 PM

    Does Colors and Styling for Visual Studio help? The UI for that can be accessed using Tools > Options > Fonts and Colors. You can see an image showing it in the User-customizable colors section of that page. Sorry that that page has too much information.


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