Color coded tabs in Visual Studio

When you open up many tabs, coloring lets you quickly distinguish which tabs are model classes, repository classes, service classes, controllers, view models, text files, configuration files, and switch between them more efficiently:

Tabs Studio provides extensive options to create colorful tabs in Visual Studio 2019 and older versions of Visual Studio. Tab coloring rules let you set distinct background and foreground for different groups of tabs:

You can filter and color tabs by project name, tab name, tab extension and document path. Regular expressions can be used to filter by a part of the string (e.g. all projects having Test in the name) and to combine several condition in one rule (e.g. c|cpp|h|hpp).

Custom filer conditions additionally include properties like IsDocument (true for regular code files and false for tabs like NuGet package manager, Class View, Object Browser etc.), IsTabSelected (you can change the selected tab color or exclude the current rule from applying to the selected tab), IsPreviouslySelectedTab (you can make the previously selected tab visually distinct), IsPreviewTab. Plus you can use all standard WPF element properties like IsMouseOver.

Tab background color and tab text color (foreground) are specified as a WPF brush - usually SolidColorBrush or LinearGradientBrush. Setting the alpha channel value for the brush makes it translucent.

In addition to automatically colored tabs, you can manually highlight a tab with Ctrl+Click or selecting a color from the tab context menu:

It adds an underline to the specific tab:

And, of course, these highlighting colors are also customizable.

Tabs Studio also lets you apply a completely custom WPF style to configure other parts of tabs UI. For example, you can set a custom color for the specific extension in a tab group:

See style documentation for in-depth coverage of visual customization.

Copyright 2009 - 2025 Vlasov Studio (Visual Studio extensions and tools)