Update: The pro power tools for 2013, which includes PresentOn is now out!
A mere seven months ago, I wrote about an awesome trick in Visual Studio 2012: PRESENTON. This trick optimises a bunch of fonts really quickly to look good on stage – not just the text editor but the IDE too!
However this relied on the Pro Power Tools extension which doesn’t exist for Visual Studio 2013 yet. So how can you achieve the same results? With just some manual settings in the IDE.
Backup
Before you start, make a backup of your current settings by going to the Tools menu, then Import & Export Settings. In the next dialog, all you need to export is the Fonts and Colors options (see image below). This will ensure that after your presentation, you can roll back to your normal experience. It is also a good idea to do this again after you are setup for your talk, so that next time you can just import it in minutes & be ready (in fact I did that & you can grab my one below).
Changing the settings
Step one, get to the font settings – which is REALLY easy. Hit Ctrl+Q, which takes you to the Quick Launch & type in font.
Now you are in the font dialog and you can change all the settings in here. The key ones I find are listed below.
- Text Editor : Naturally, this is the text that appears on the screen!
- Environment Font : This badly titled item is for the IDE, all menus and text rendered in the IDE that is readonly is affected. This really makes your IDE much easier to see.
- Code Lens : For VS 2013 Ultimate*
- Statement Completion : This is intellisense – since I use it a lot, I find it helps the audience see better what I am doing
- Editor Tooltip : If you are showing off the editor which may include tooltips you can make them larger**.
- Package Manager Console : If you are demo’ing Nuget and/or Entity Framework Migrations this is very useful to increase**.
- Output Window : Always something worth having large because compilation is a big part of any talk.
- Locals Window : Another one that is good for IDE demos or demo’s where you are doing demo’s focused on debugging**.
- JavaScript Console : Lastly for the JS demos, a must have. **
Font Choice
Something to think about when doing this, is what should this look like. For almost a decade, I’ve followed the advice from Don Box on what goes into a great technical presentation which is min font size of 14 point (I use 16pt). While I think he was spot on with font choice, now days I use a different font called DejaVu Sans Mono which I think looks amazing.
My Presenter Settings
Since I did this for the recent TechDays, you may want to use my presenter settings file so you can grab it below!
* If you want Code Lens for versions of VS other than ultimate, go and make your voice heard: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/4150271-make-codelens-available-outside-of-ultimate
** This setting is not included in my presenter settings which you can download below.