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syntax-highlightingvisual-studio-2022

How to disable reference highlighting in Visual Studio 2022

The problem is displayed in this image.

word highlights

Changing the item background color for Highlighted Reference helps a bit but they are still highlighted with boxes around them. In the old versions of Visual Studio it was caused by productivity power tools extension and there was an option to disable it. I do not have productivity power tools extension installed on Visual Studio 2022.

reference highlight color setting

There seems to be options to disable this for languages like c#. Is there a way to completely remove this highlighting in editors for "All Languages"?

Solution

  • There doesn't seem to be a setting that turns it off for all languages, however if you change the RBG values to 30 for all three (if you are using the default dark theme in Visual Studio), you can essentially achieve this, since the highlighting will be the same exact color as the background, thus hiding it. To change these, click the "Custom..." button for both the items foreground and background and set the red, green, and blue values to 30. The rest of the values should automatically adjust.

    The problem is, Highlighted Reference doesn't cover everything. You probably will also want to set the same RGB values for Highlighted Written Reference and Highlighted Definition, otherwise some things will still get highlighted.

    Here is a .gif showing how this works will all three of these settings set to 30 in a C# code file:

    highlights

    You actually have one more Highlighted setting than my Visual Studio installation (perhaps I need an update) and that is the Highlighted Parameter one. Presumably, that controls the highlight of parameters to methods and such. I would assume you'd want that to also be set to 30 for the RBG values.

    Also, you may notice that in the .gif it looks like there is a box around the item my cursor is under - that is because of the Highlight Current Line setting. You can also set that to 30 for the RBG values to achieve a 100% un-highlighted experience, but that might be going a bit extreme!