Changing font colors of tabs in Visual Studio 2013 IDE

Question

I cannot find how to change the font colors for the tabs in the Visual Studio 2013 IDE.

Environment -> Fonts and Colors doesn't have anything that allows this. And I can't see anything else that will help.

My problem is that the selected page has bold black font on a relatively dark background, and I have to strain my eyes to see what file is selected.

Any help, suggestions or extensions much appreciated.

Answer 1

I have just found what I need in the Customize button of the document well (to right of the Document Well, the drop down that lists the tabs that are not visible, at the bottom, Customize). This is available if you install the Productivity Power Tools 2013.

This opens the options for Productivity Power Tools. The relevant one is:

Custom Document Well -> Advanced. (Don't be fooled by the Color Coding option).

Ignore everything except the selected tab drop down (at the bottom of the dialog). Set that to VS Colors and I get a decent, readable selected tab, which was my main problem.

Can't imagine why this is so obfuscated, let alone why the default seems to render unreadable colors.

Answer 2

You can also customize your tab colors manually (VS 2013 Pro w/ Productivity Tools installed).

Go to TOOLS > Options > Productivity Power Tools > Custom Document Well > Check the box for "Color tabs by regular expression", then go to Color Coding >

From there you can add Reg. Ex and customize even by file type. Example - you can have anything that ends in html (ex - .*html which will include .cshtml) to have a certain color:

.*\.*html

Then select your desired color under the "Tab Color" column.