Npp-VS2012-Dark

Visual Studio Dark Theme for Notepad++

This is a replica of the Visual Studio dark theme introduced in 2012 (and still used in Visual Studio 2026) that can be loaded into Notepad++. I created it to ease switching between files opened in Visual Studio and Notepad++. Particularly close attention has been paid to C, C++, and XML but a number of other languages have been tested.

Installation (per-machine)

1. Download VSDark.xml, making sure to get the raw version, to %PROGRAMFILES%\Notepad++\themes (%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Notepad++\themes on 64-bit systems).
2. Restart Notepad++.
3. Open Settings->Style Configurator.
4. Select VSDark from the theme drop-down box.
5. Click Save & Close

Issues

While the colours are very close, if not spot on, there are some differences in appearance between this theme and Visual Studio. Visual Studio’s lexer is more inteligent and often uses information from Intelisense to differentiate between class identifiers and variable identifiers. Notepad++'s lexer is more primitive and cannot make this distinction. Notepad++ is also not as good as interpreting precompiler statements. But that’s OK, you don’t use them anyway, right?

If you find anything else wrong, feel free to let me know.

Screenshot