How to disable all caps menu titles in Visual Studio

Question

I assume the title is self explanatory. Just want to change the look of the Visual Studio 2012 not to show menu title in all capital letters.

Answer 1

I think "VSCommands for Visual Studio 2012" is the best option for this.

Grab this plugin from here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a83505c6-77b3-44a6-b53b-73d77cba84c8

Answer 2

I have been using the following reg files to enable/disable the lowercasing in Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013:

http://erwinmayer.com/dl/VS2012_ALLCAPS_Toggle.zip http://erwinmayer.com/dl/VS2013_ALLCAPS_Toggle.zip

Just double click on VS201x_ALLCAPS_Disable.reg inside the archive to disable all caps menu titles, and VS201x_ALLCAPS_Enable.reg to re-enable them.

You can easily edit the reg files before with a text editor to see what they contain.

Answer 3

The VS Commands extension can do this and is one of the most popular on the gallery. Worth checking out!

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a83505c6-77b3-44a6-b53b-73d77cba84c8?SRC=VSIDE

Answer 4

And for

Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WDExpress\11.0\General
DWORD: SuppressUppercaseConversion
Value: 1

I guess the reason MS omitted any mention of Visual Studio from the keyname is that such a mention might help someone identify the key :)

Answer 5

Richard Banks posted about a registry key for just such a tweak.

Visual Studio 2012 (Full)

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General
DWORD: SuppressUppercaseConversion
Value: 1

In PowerShell, you can run this to set that registry key and the uppercase goes away.

Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1

Visual Studio Express 2012

The above registry key is not the one that will affect Visual Studio Express 2012 RC. A comment by FormatC showed up on Banks post about the key for Express. You can find that key mentioned in Mike Gleason's answer or run the following PowerShell command to set it.

Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\VSWinExpress\11.0\General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1

Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web

Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\VWDExpress\11.0\General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1

Visual Studio 2013

Replace 11.0 with 12.0 in the registry keys above.

Visual Studio 2015 Developer Preview

Replace 11.0 with 14.0 in the registry keys above.

Answer 6

I have written an extension which will do this for you.

You can download it from the Visual Studio Gallery:

• VSCommands for Visual Studio 2012
• VSCommands for Visual Studio 2013

It can also hide main menu altogether and have it appear only on mouse over or alt key press (like in IE)