Visual Studio - Stop keyword highlighting

Author

Stop keyword highlighting

JKop

2004-10-13, 9:09 am

I installed Visual Studio 2003 .NET yesterday.

I'm used to writing C++ code in just a plain old text editor. I don't want
keywords to be highlighted, nor do I want any tooltips at all.

I've been through "Customize" and "Options" but to no avail. Does anyone
know how to achieve what I want?

-JKop

J. Buelna - Houston, TX

2004-10-15, 3:56 am

"JKop" <NULL@NULL.NULL> wrote in message
news:Ev7bd.33301$Z14.13481@news.indigo.ie...
>I installed Visual Studio 2003 .NET yesterday.
>
> I'm used to writing C++ code in just a plain old text editor. I don't want
> keywords to be highlighted, nor do I want any tooltips at all.
>
> I've been through "Customize" and "Options" but to no avail. Does anyone
> know how to achieve what I want?
>
>
> -JKop

Hello JKop,

Change individual colors [Tools > Options > Fonts and Colors]

- or -

Export! and then delete the following registry key if you want to get rid of
syntax highlighting, tool tips, and intellisense all in one shot -
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/VisualStudio/<version>/Languages/FileExtensions/.cpp

J. Buelna - Houston, TX

=======
This posting is provided with no warranties, and confers no rights.

JKop

2004-10-16, 8:56 am

J. Buelna - Houston, TX posted:

>
> "JKop" <NULL@NULL.NULL> wrote in message
> news:Ev7bd.33301$Z14.13481@news.indigo.ie...
>
>
>
> Hello JKop,
>
> Change individual colors [Tools > Options > Fonts and Colors]
>
> - or -
>
> Export! and then delete the following registry key if you want to get
> rid of syntax highlighting, tool tips, and intellisense all in one shot
> -
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/VisualStudio/<version>/Languages/F
> ileExtensions/.cpp
>
>
> J. Buelna - Houston, TX
>
>
>=======
> This posting is provided with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Thank you very very much! I took the good ol' registry route!

What happens if I delete *all* those keys for all the file types... will it
leave me be with just a plain ol' text editor?

Regards,

JKop

Philip Taylor

2004-10-16, 3:56 pm

My advice to you, JKop, is to move forward and accept coloured keywords. It
may not be what you have been used to, but you will very quickly come to
like the idea. I took this step some years ago and now I find it gives me a
very quick visual check that keywords are in scope and not commented out.

One thought though and that is that at some time you will want to print out
some of your code, and it will probably be just using simple black & white,
so your code style should not depend on colours. So don't change your coding
style, but embrace colours. They don't have to be garish and painful to look
at. Personally, I use blue keywords and green comments with code remaining
in black and white.

"JKop" <NULL@NULL.NULL> wrote in message
news:ef7cd.37183$Z14.13603@news.indigo.ie...
> J. Buelna - Houston, TX posted:
>
>
>
>
> Thank you very very much! I took the good ol' registry route!
>
>
> What happens if I delete *all* those keys for all the file types... will
> it
> leave me be with just a plain ol' text editor?
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
> JKop

JKop

2004-10-17, 3:56 pm

Philip Taylor posted:

> My advice to you, JKop, is to move forward and accept coloured
> keywords. It may not be what you have been used to, but you will very
> quickly come to like the idea. I took this step some years ago and now
> I find it gives me a very quick visual check that keywords are in scope
> and not commented out.
>
> One thought though and that is that at some time you will want to print
> out some of your code, and it will probably be just using simple black
> & white, so your code style should not depend on colours. So don't
> change your coding style, but embrace colours. They don't have to be
> garish and painful to look at. Personally, I use blue keywords and
> green comments with code remaining in black and white.

Thanks for the input, Philip.

I actually started out doing C++ programming in Visual Studio, so I started
out with the highlighted keywords.

Then one time, I had to work with a particular machine on which Visual
Studio would not install (I think Version 6 won't install on WinXP). Anyway,
I had to switch to simple editors, and everything was just plain black text.
At first I found it very unsettling. I thought I knew the language, but then
it looked so cryptic to me in black and white. Eventually, as my C++
expertise progressed (for instance, now I know all the keywords and can spot
them a mile away), I began to become used to working with plain black text
source files. Especially viewing code on newsgroups, all I would do is set
the font to monospace and read away naturally.

I also like the idea of the code being "dead"; by which I mean that it's
just text, nothing animative happens until you compile it. But then in
Visual Studio, you type "voi" and then you type that final "d", and
suddenly: animation! it becomes blue.

But...

then I installed Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the highlighted keywords were
back. I suppose there was a sort of paranoia going on in my head, that once
I'd got used to seeing all those colours again, that it would seem so
cryptic to me again in black text. And so... after a few hours of
programming "in colour", I viewed a source file in black text. All the time
in my head I was thinking about those colours, I kept thinking to myself,
"How come int is no longer a keyword...?". I know that there should be no
confusion and that there's a perfect rationale behind it, but I think it
plays too much on the innate human tendancy to strongly associate with
colours (for instance, although red is not the most noticable colour to the
human eye, it is still the most noticed colour by humans as it's associated
with blood). I'll be happy once I've spent a while with simple black text in
such an advanced development suite as Microsft Visual Studio, and then...
tthheenn... I'll be ol' skool!

-JKop

JShepherd

2004-10-19, 4:02 am

In article <ustqIymsEHA.2536@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl>, spam@spam says...
>
>
>"JKop" <NULL@NULL.NULL> wrote in message
>news:Ev7bd.33301$Z14.13481@news.indigo.ie...
>
>Hello JKop,
>
>Change individual colors [Tools > Options > Fonts and Colors]
>
>- or -
>
>Export! and then delete the following registry key if you want to get rid of
>syntax highlighting, tool tips, and intellisense all in one shot -
>HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/VisualStudio/<version>/Languages/FileExt
en
>sions/.cpp
>
>
>J. Buelna - Houston, TX
>
>
>=======
>This posting is provided with no warranties, and confers no rights.

In VS6 could to hit alt+enter and select C as the language for
syntax highlighting when the file was C source but did not have a .c
extension.

That nice feature seems to have been removed in VS.Net

Is there a mechanism in VS.Net to select C syntax highlighting
for an arbitrary filename ?

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