96

Is there any way to replace VS2012 solution explorer's icons with VS2010 ones? At least 'folder' icon :(

EgorBo
  • 6,120
  • 3
  • 35
  • 40
  • 32
    Wait for VS 2014? Maybe they'll bring back the helpful color and icons by then .... – marc_s Aug 23 '12 at 08:49
  • 1
    No luck with that. VS2013 does not have color icons. Ugh – Raj More Jan 28 '15 at 15:11
  • [EDIT - finally made this happen!] I've finally found out a way to switch the icons back to the ones in VS2010! See my blog post at http://computerbeacon.net/blog/visualstudio2010iconsandt – kevin Sep 07 '12 at 12:19

4 Answers4

52

Here is a shot of my VS2012 install that almost looks like the familiar 2010 we are all used to. It makes me feel normal again!

enter image description here

Here is exactly how I did this, step-by-step:

1) Close all instances of Visual Studio

2) Download vsip and extract it to a temp directory. (as of 1/3/2013 the current version is 1.5.2)

3) Open up a command prompt with "Run as administrator"

4) Go to the temp directory and run VSIP.exe - This will run an interactive program that accepts commands.
  4a) Type "backup --version=2012" - This will backup all of your VS2012 UI dlls, just in case something gets messed up and you want to uninstall VSIP.
  4b) Type "extract" - This will extract all of the old icons from your installation of VS2010 (per VS2010 license VSIP can not distribute those icons so we have to have a local install to pull them from).
  4c) Type "inject" - This will inject all of the old 2010 icons from the previous step into the VS2012 DLLs.
  4d) Type "menus -n" - This will change the menus so they are NOT ALL CAPITALIZED!

5) Download and install NiceVS - do not download the one dated 10/14 or you will be missing icons. As of 1/3/2013 I downloaded the file named "NiceVS.0.8.1.1 Beta.Full.vsix".

6) Download and install VS2012 Color Theme Editor - The next time you start VS2012 select the "Blue" theme from the color select window.

Now you should have a nice install of VS2012 that looks like my screen shot above! It takes three different applications to patch that hideous UI but it's certainly workable now! If you don't have VS2010 installed on the same machine as VS2012 then you will have to run step 4b on a machine with VS2010 and then copy the VSIP Images directory to your 2012 development machine.

Update: If you install "VS 2012 Update 1" after running these steps you will need to re-run step 4c from the VSIP admin prompt (or all of step 4 if you didn't keep the extract of the VS2010 images). The file menu icons and color scheme stay as they are but the update reverts the icons in the solution explorer back to the ugly ones. Re-running the VSIP inject fixes it right up!

EverPresent
  • 1,903
  • 17
  • 21
  • 4
    +1 for NiceVS. Much needed to fix the horrid icons. I think people are concerned about the black-blob icons being hard to decipher more than the bland color. But that's bad too. Poor VS2012, it got thwacked with the ugly stick. – Shane Castle Jan 11 '13 at 03:49
  • 2
    I do have to thank you. I have to. I've worked few days in the "MS style" ... and then I decided to search how to change it. Thanks for great description. It is working and VS 2012 (powerful tool except its UI style) is beautiful again. Thanks a lot +1 – Radim Köhler Apr 23 '13 at 15:09
  • It might be worth noting that VSIP does not support Express editions. If any of your VS is an Express, download the source code and fiddle with VisualStudio2010.cs and/or VisualStudio2012.cs to hardcode returned values for these (add another value to the enum, `Express = 4`, and put things like `if(edition==Edition.Express) return "1033"` for language code(s) and `return true` for IsVersionInstalled). – GSerg Nov 06 '13 at 08:43
  • Additionally, I had to flush the cache, delete the folder at: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\ComponentModelCache and restarting did it for me (running 20123). – yougotiger Jul 03 '14 at 17:39
  • Do you have one for VS2013? – Raj More Jan 28 '15 at 15:51
  • It seems that VSIP is no longer being updated (regarding VS2013 support). I did notice that NiceVS received a couple of check-ins for VS2013 support around middle of 2014 but no releases have been made since. You might be able to build from source but I don't know how stable the current code is. – EverPresent Jan 28 '15 at 17:58
50

Short Answer: Hack the old icons into 2012.

Visual Studio Icon Patcher - http://vsip.codeplex.com

Long Answer: Doing this with a plugin, for now, is out of the question. I've been unable to find any built-in way to achieve this and the switch to WPF makes it even harder to hack around.

This app simply extracts the image resources from the unmanaged DLLs in Visual Studio 2010 and injects them into the DLLs for Visual Studio 2012. The managed resources are a lot more complex and haven't been added in yet, though I have gotten some to work.

The initial release didn't work well with themes that had a dark Tree View background color due to how the icon colors are inverted when a dark background color is detected. This is made even worse in the newest release since menu & toolbar icons are included now. I'm running this with the Blue Theme and it looks fine.

One way to hack around the icon inversion is to edit all the extracted images to add a single cyan pixel in the top right corner of each icon in the image map. This will exclude them from the inversion process. I haven't tried this though because I ran into issues early on when manipulating the images where they wouldn't display right. You could try it but it'll be fairly manual and time consuming and may not even work.

Brian Surowiec
  • 17,123
  • 8
  • 41
  • 64
5

Look at this thread: Solution Explorer - custom icons for my folders

I think it's also applicable for vs2012

If not -> you can manually find solution explorer's icon resources with ResHack (or Resource Hacker) and simply replace it!

Community
  • 1
  • 1
opewix
  • 4,993
  • 1
  • 20
  • 42
4

Here is the solution:

Visual Studio Icon Patcher http://vsip.codeplex.com/

Description from VSIP web page:

Project Description Visual Studio Icon Patcher allows you to update Visual Studio 2012 with the icons from Visual Studio 2010.

Until someone can find a way to change the icons via a plug-in the only way to change them is through resource patching the DLLs that Visual Studio uses. There are a number of managed and unmanaged DLLs containing Bitmaps and PNGs that are used to style the application. For now only the unmanaged DLLs are part of this process with the managed DLLs hopefully coming soon.

No images are distributed with this project. You will need to have both Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 installed to use this.

Update
I've just tested VSIP with Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, and it work flawlessly :-)

Max
  • 7,408
  • 2
  • 26
  • 32
  • @vman sure, but anyone can read my answer, and find the solution in 5 seconds, just after reading 4 words. Instead you need to read half page of text for understanding the accepted answer. So, when I read the question, I decided that the accepted answer was too long to read it, and I posted my answer. Not everybody have the time to read everything, sometime you just need to read some words, and click a link. :-) Naturally I have the maximum respect for Brian Surowiec and it's answer... my answer is not better, is just different :-) – Max Sep 28 '12 at 18:56
  • 3
    I cleaned up my answer some for you :) – Brian Surowiec Sep 28 '12 at 19:57
  • @BrianSurowiec Thanks, now it's perfect! And thanks for developing Visual Studio Icon Patcher, It will save my when we will switch to the new IDE :) – Max Sep 29 '12 at 17:24