NightOwl

A refined Night Owl-inspired dark theme for Visual Studio 2022 and Visual Studio 2026.

NightOwl brings a comfortable deep-navy coding environment to Visual Studio with vivid but balanced syntax colors, strong readability, and full shell integration for the modern Visual Studio 2026 UI.

What's new in 1.0.1

• Explicit dark colors for VS 2026 window bodies, headers, and tabs.
• Fixed the VS 2022 Publish page background and unreadable status messages.

Highlights

• Visual Studio 2022 + 2026 — one package for both generations.
• Modern VS 2026 shell support — includes semantic Shell and ShellInternal Fluent theme colors.
• Comfortable editor contrast — designed around a deep navy background with clear syntax separation.
• Broad editor coverage — tuned colors for C#, JSON, XML, Razor, HTML/CSS, C/C++, Python, and more.
• amd64 + arm64 — supports both Visual Studio architectures.
• No telemetry — the extension does not collect data.
• No network access — the theme runs entirely locally.

Install and enable

After installing the extension, open:

Tools > Options > Environment > Visual Experience

Then select:

Color theme: NightOwl

For Visual Studio 2026, also use:

Editor appearance: Match Theme

Compatibility

• Visual Studio 2022 (17.x)
• Visual Studio 2026 (18.x)
• Community
• Professional
• Enterprise
• amd64
• arm64

Support

Issues: https://github.com/MeisamSalehi/NightOwl/issues
Email: mey3amsalehi@gmail.com

Credits and license

NightOwl for Visual Studio is based on the original Night Owl theme by Sarah Drasner and incorporates Visual Studio porting work by Mateusz Kalina / God0nlyKnows. The project is distributed under the MIT License, with upstream license notices preserved in the package.