The red and yellow standard colors of xdebug can hurt your eyes after a few hours.
http://www.designified.com/blog/article/76/restyling-xdebug-output describes how to re
Another option is to disable xdebug from overloading var_dump. In the php.ini [XDebug] section add xdebug.overload_var_dump=0
[XDebug]
xdebug.overload_var_dump=0
Formatting the output is then up to you; one such way could be wrapping var_dump in your own debug function that prints tags.
var_dump