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I20040413 Color and font settings are sometimes grouped with other colors and fonts, and sometimes grouped with preferences for their parts. I know this is a work in progress but it's in a mess right now and I don't necessarily like the way it seems to be going. Let me give three examples and then some specific recommendations based on my experience with user interface design. Ex1. The Ant Editor color for text is set in Preferences > Workbench > Colors and Fonts > Ant Editor Appearance > Text color. The font for that text is set (I think) in Preferences > Workbench > Colors and Fonts > Text Font. The color used for spelling error annotations in the Ant editor is set in Preferences > Ant > Editor > Annotations. Ex2. The Java Editor color for comments is set in Preferences > Java > Editor > Syntax > Multi-line comment. You can control whether or not the text is bold there too, but if you want to change the font that is in Preferences > Workbench > Colors and Fonts > Text Font > Java Editor Text Font. Ex3. The PDE editor has its source page color settings under Preferences > Plug-in Development > Editors. The color field editors on this page are quite different looking than the other two mentioned above. I didn't find a place to change the font for this window. Recommendations: R1. I believe the most usable design would have colors and fonts for a particular component, such as the Java editor or the Ant editor, set in one place in the preference sub-category for that particular component. For example, for Ant that would be Preferences > Ant > xx, and for Java that would be Preferences > Java > xx, where xx is some conventional category name like "Appearance" or "Colors and Fonts" or whatever that all components would provide. There are just too many options to try and lump all font/color settings for all editors and views in one tree view. R2. Ideally every component's Appearance (or whatever it's called) preference page would have a look and feel that is common to all the other pages that serve the same purpose. This could be aided by having a standard public API dialog subclass or field editor that could be shared by Ant, text editors, PDE, Java editors, third party plug-ins, and so forth. The way the settings work for the Java editor colors would be, I believe, a good example for the whole platform UI to follow. R3. The field editors for colors and fonts should let you control the foreground color, the background color, the custom colors, the font, the size, bold/italic/underscore, etc. in one place because it's common to want to change more than one at a time. Many applications are available for examples of how best to do this so you don't have to invent a new design for it. R4. In cases where an attribute like the font name cannot be set independently that can be grayed out or disabled somehow, or affect all members of the dependent class, but anyway I don't think it helps usability any to put these cases under a 'color' menu/label/icon and other cases under a 'font' menu/label/icon as is done in this version.
In regards to R3/R4: I agree that there are times when fonts and colors should be more integrated (ex: for syntax highlighting there's foreground color, background color, and bold) Perhaps fonts/colors/themes could be more customizable so we can group together fonts & colors. So that we can then specify something like: <colorFont id="KEYWORD" label="keyword" ... > <colorDefinition id="KEYWORD.foreground" ... /> <colorDefinition id="KEYWORD.background" ... /> <fontDefinition id="KEYWORD.font" /> </colorFont> Or maybe we could just provide our own dialog to edit.
I was thinking of allowing font/color bindings post 3.0 much like you suggested. What we have now is going to stick around for 3.0, however... marking as later.
[3.1M5a] The abililty to change forground and background of all visible windows would be really useful, in order to facitlitate an inverse or dark color scheme. E.g. for a black background with white foreground text. Currently you can only adapt the color scheme of the Java Editor to have a black background, but the surrounding windows are stuck with the white background, irritating the eye. A separate color scheme for printing on white paper would also be necessary then.
As of now 'LATER' and 'REMIND' resolutions are no longer supported. Please reopen this bug if it is still valid for you.
