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vortex
New Member
Ukraine
6 Posts |
 Posted - Mar 23 2006 : 05:15:14 AM
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VA 1444, MSVS 2005 IDE, C++
This is not bug, actally. Rather small improvement needed, I think.
Fiew pictures, which describes the problem:
Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
As you can see, I use invert color scheme, when background is darker (dark blue in my case) than base color (yellow in my case). Problem araises when I turn on enhaced syntax coloring for tooltips, views listboxes and wizard bar in Visual Assist. All numbers and some of reserved C++ words became yellow on bright background (white for listboxes and comboboxes, and dark yellow in tooltips). You can notice that it is really hard to see what is written in this color configuration.
My color configuraion in VA is default:
I cannot change background color for listboxes and tooltips. I think VA takes default color from MSVS "Font and Colors" dialog, "Plain Text" item for "Text editor" settings section. Field "Item Foreground".
Is it possible to define, someway, the default color for VA, instead of taking it from MSVS color configuration? |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
18939 Posts |
Posted - Mar 23 2006 : 3:39:27 PM
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the normal advice here is to apply VA's enhanced colouring to "source windows" only, and not to anything else. this assumes that you are only using a dark colour scheme in the editor.
depending on your personal preferences there are several possibilities here. perhaps the easier is to use a lighter background colour for the IDE. using:
windows control panel -> display -> appearance
you can set the windows colour scheme its self. changing the colour for the item "window" to something off white, rather than white can be a big help. personally i find a very pale blue is a good colour, and by setting it this way this effects all windows, not just the code editor in the IDE.
alternatively you can change the global tooltip colour in the same windows dialog, which should effect all IDE tooltips. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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support
Whole Tomato Software
5566 Posts |
Posted - Mar 24 2006 : 12:28:09 AM
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Read more at:
www.wholetomato.com/products/features/color.html?more=yes&goto=darkBackground |
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bob_cardillo
New Member
5 Posts |
Posted - Apr 05 2006 : 2:09:24 PM
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| Any chance we can get a feature in VA that lets us control the background color of the formatted VA tooltips, to override the Windows tooltip default? The VA feature of coloring the text within the tooltip is valuable to me, but I too can't use it since I use a dark background for my IDE. |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
18939 Posts |
Posted - Apr 05 2006 : 4:01:22 PM
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controlling the background colour in the editor its self is a very hard problem, so i suspect that changing the background colour of the tooltips will be tricky, at the very least.
have you tried changing the system wide tooltip colour? you should be able to find a colour that works well both in the IDE and outside of it. perhaps a pale blue shade? |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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support
Whole Tomato Software
5566 Posts |
Posted - Apr 05 2006 : 6:25:30 PM
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| We can't change background of IDE tooltips. We just don't have enough control of the IDE to do it. |
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bugfix
Tomato Guru
Germany
324 Posts |
Posted - Apr 06 2006 : 01:23:33 AM
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Won't SetWindowsHookEx which captures WM_NOTIFY w/ TTN_SHOW followed by SendMessage(TTM_SETTIPTEXTCOLOR/TTM_SETTIPBKCOLOR) solve this?
-bugfix |
http://www.mf-sd.de |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
18939 Posts |
Posted - Apr 07 2006 : 6:07:28 PM
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| the problem is that the IDE does not know that VA is there, so VA has to sneak around behind the IDE's back without breaking anything in the process. as a result simple solutions tend not to work so well for VA, unfortunately. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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kevinsikes
Tomato Guru
USA
271 Posts |
Posted - Apr 08 2006 : 4:41:00 PM
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| How about maintaining a separate pallette for code windows vs. tooltips and dropdown boxes? Then you could specifiy a light color for code windows and a dark color for the tooltips and dropdown boxes. |
Kevin Sikes
Infotainment Platform Design Engineer
Ford Motor Company |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
18939 Posts |
Posted - Apr 08 2006 : 5:19:06 PM
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remember that some of the colours VA applies to tooltips, e.g. comments, come from the IDE's settings. duplicating all possible IDE colour options that might apply to tooltips is a scary thought!
i know from playing around with my own windows colour scheme it is quite possible to get tooltip background colours that just do not work well with VA, regardless of your IDE's background colour scheme. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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support
Whole Tomato Software
5566 Posts |
Posted - Apr 08 2006 : 8:01:10 PM
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We won't support separate palettes for source windows and tooltips. Aside from complicating our options dialog, it's very difficult to remember that methods might appear in two colors. (We tried internally, long ago.)
Your options are to use a common background for source windows and tooltips (set in desktop properties,) disable coloring in tooltips, or find a set of colors that provides sufficient contrast with different background colors. |
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BendA
New Member
3 Posts |
Posted - Jul 18 2007 : 09:08:19 AM
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I have the same problem...and setting my IDE background to another color is definitely not a good idea (at least for me).
Apart from tooltips, there are other controls you use (WizardBar, Object Browser). It's really impossible to somehow "hack" the background color of these controls? |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
18939 Posts |
Posted - Jul 18 2007 : 2:40:12 PM
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One problem here is what to try and change? Some of the items, like VA View are entirely under our control, since we add them to the IDE, but most of the time we are applying syntax highlighting to the IDE's own controls. Here we only have a very limited amount of "control".
If you know where to look you can already find various problems with our enhanced colouring.
Unfortunately the IDE does not make things easy for us. Also remember that we need to try and support VC6, VS2002, VS2003 and VS2005 simultaneously, which makes things even more complicated. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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bob_cardillo
New Member
5 Posts |
Posted - Jul 18 2007 : 3:01:29 PM
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Right, but it was precisely because VA elegantly takes care of so many amazing and seemingly difficult challenges that I bought it in the first place. I'm not personally taking these challenges on myself, so I can't really complain too much, but it just seems to me as a programmer that it should be doable (considering all the other seemingly impossible stuff you guys have been able to accomplish) to just make all IDE tooltips have a certain user-specified background color instead of the Windows default.
A post from bugfix on Apr 6, 2006 in this topic suggested a promising way of doing it. And even if that exact technique didn't work for some reason, you guys already somehow found a way to set the foreground color and font (and not just for the whole thing at once, but for individual pieces of the tooltip text). Compared to that, changing the tooltip background color seems like it should be a cake walk. No? |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
18939 Posts |
Posted - Jul 18 2007 : 5:14:49 PM
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One partial answer is that until Find References and highlight all changing the background colour was considered to hard to do reliably.
We have to sneak around behind the IDE, so things never seem to be as simple in reality as they sound in theory.
The class browser in VS2005 is a good example of a place where we still have problems getting the foreground colouring to work correctly. It is good, but not quite perfect.
Another answer is where we focus our resources. There are quite a few current bug reports and feature requests, so we need to focus our attention. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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Coloring in dark color schemes
