Visual Studio 2012 / 2013 Syntax Highlighting errors

Question

I have a problem with syntax highlighting in visual studio 2012 and 2013 preview with C++. I've had this problem since I installed both a few days ago (tried 2013 after I saw the problem in 2012).

As you can see from below, the colours are completely messed up in the text; some keywords such as int aren't properly highlighted, the grey return value is completely broken on various texts, the class colours have merged with various texts etc.

I've done the usual stuff found from google but had zero success, such as:

• Reset intellisence from %appdata%
• Reset user settings via command prompt or from Tools -> Import & Export settings
• Turned off hardware acceleration in Visual Studio options.

This does not happen at all in Visual Studio 2010 fortunately, so I've kept that on my machine in the mean time. I did install 2012 and 2013 while 2010 was still present on my machine, but during install, i did not select the options to import 2010 settings, so "technically" they should have been clean IDE installs. The only other thing I've noticed is; when you start a project in 2012 or 2013, all the code highlighting is completely correct, but as soon as you change or add any text, everything messes up (like in the above image). So it does seem that Intellisense or whatever controls the highlighting only functions once on start up, and suddenly stops working for the duration of the program.

Answer 1

Delete this key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\FontAndColors\Cache

and restart vs2013.

Found it in a discussion on codeplex . Although my problem was the lack of colors, you should try it

Answer 2

I can't offer a solution to this issue, but I can tell you that it's an issue that's plagued Microsoft Visual Studio 2012. In VS2010, the highlighting was fairly basic for C++, as you couldn't set the colouring on user types and loads of other things.

In VS2010, like you I had no problem with the syntax highlighting at all, but there was a lot less that you could actually highlight. Ever since they introduced this extra highlighting for C++ so you could colour a lot more items, it's been very buggy.

At the moment, I've got operators in all sorts of colours, matching brackets and braces in different colours and half-coloured qualifiers etc. I've just had to live with it... but if you're reading this MS, please... PLEASE... pretty please get it fixed.