How to change the braces/parenthesis colors in Visual Studio 2015

Question

The dark theme in Visual Studio 2015 makes it nearly impossible to see braces/parenthesis. Is anyone aware of how to fix this using the Fonts and Colors options? The previous solutions I've seen for older versions of visual studio do not work.

Answer 1

Switching the theme to light then to dark fixes it, but also a simple restart of Visual Studio always fixed it for me.

Answer 2

I just updated my VS 2017 to Update 15.2 and had this problem occur again. I checked the Operators and Punctuation in Tools>Options>Fonts&Colors and they were all set to White yet they still showed as black in the UI (must be a bug). Setting them both back to Automatic finally resolved my issue.

Answer 3

Had this happen today in VS2017 when opening an older MVC4 project & after installing updates and new components.

Either the updates or the use of an older project seemed to corrupt the "Dark" color theme. All parentheses, brackets, and operators were suddenly black & nearly invisible.

Rather than messing w/individual "Fonts and Colors" settings for punctuation, etc, I only had to switch to the "Blue" theme, and then back to the "Dark" theme.

Tools -> Options -> Environment -> General ... "Color Theme"

This fixed the issue and reset VS2017 to the default Dark theme w/light-gray brackets & operators.

If you have other font/color customization, VS remembers those settings within that theme. e.g. if you make 'punctuation' lime-green in the "Dark" theme, then switch to Light/Blue, then back to "Dark", the punctuation remains lime-green only in the "Dark" theme where you'd customized it.

Answer 4

With resharper installed, the options from visual studio are overwritten. The option to change the color is then :

Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors > ReSharper Matched Brace

Answer 5

"Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors > Operator" worked for me.

Answer 6

I don't know about you guys, but for me it was Visual Assist messing with matching brace colors... Tools > Options >Fonts and Colors > VA Brace Matching.

Hope it'll help someone.

Answer 7

I had the same thing, but all my semicolons were black, too. Here's where I fixed it:

Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors > Punctuation

Answer 8

I got sent over to this question from a related question. I may be missing the distinction but it seems like the same issue to me. I also noticed Brian Pickens's comment saying it's still an issue in VS 2015 RTM.

In the RTM build, I can change the brace matching color successfully. For an example, here's what I see when I set the Brace Matching display item in Tools->Options->Environment->Fonts and Colors to Maroon:

There was a bug on this for C# (and maybe VB) previously that was leaving users with just the very dark gray on black color with no way to change it. Please let me know if I'm missing something on this though and, if so, I'd love to get some more details on how to reproduce what you're seeing.