Visual Studio 2026 recently netted a powerful feature that finally allows developers to review Git Pull Requests (PRs) directly in the integrated development environment (IDE), without needing to switch to the browser. However, that"s not all that Microsoft introduced in the latest version, as it also offered a useful way to customize the IDE to their heart"s content.
Although Visual Studio 2026 already provides lots of stock themes based on Fluent Design principles, Microsoft understands that people still want to customize them further according to their preferences. The IDE now offers a new configuration page for themes under Tools > Options > Environment > Visual Experience > Theme colors. This allows you to set hex color codes for accent colors, hover states, and more, and apply them without requiring a restart. The Redmond tech giant further says that:
Whatever you change is saved against the current theme, not globally. So, you can have your own personal twist on Dark, a different twist on Light, and a wildly different one on a tinted theme, and switching between them brings your customizations along automatically.
If you go too far down a rabbit hole, there’s a per-color reset so you can revert a single token without throwing away the rest of your work.
Microsoft is also offering granular color tokens that allow you to customize various UX elements like the tab header without impacting the rest of the shell chrome. Your themes are also stored in JSON format in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\18.0_xxxxxxxx\ColorThemes, which basically enables you to share it with others or override existing themes.
This is a major improvement in terms of the user experience powering these customization capabilities. This is because extensions were required to replace the theme, and it was not very easy to make minor adjustments. This theme configuration UX solves this problem and is available in Visual Studio 2026 version 18.7, available here.