Colourising Palettes

[richmond62]

Screenshot 2025-03-08 at 20.18.27.png (163.26 KiB) Viewed 12365 times

-
I wonder if there is a way to colourise the labels in the properties palettes?

Because colourising each substack is mind-blowingly tedious:
-

Screenshot 2025-03-08 at 20.35.15.png (142.59 KiB) Viewed 12365 times

-

conversations.jpg (250.77 KiB) Viewed 12366 times

-
Conversations
with Unjustly
Obscure
Rock 'n' Soul
Eccentrics

[tperry2x]

Okay, I've taken the bait: I'm going to ask the obvious question. Why would you want to do this?

[richmond62]

Everything is a lot easier to see.

[tperry2x]

Everything is a lot easier to see.

Each to their own, but if you wanted to do this:

edit-this.png (138.49 KiB) Viewed 12086 times

Edit the "revinspectogroupbehavior.livecodescript". In the handler "rowLabel", you can see at the end I've added a single line where I set the label colour. (line 138).

[richmond62]

Thank you.

I wonder if that could be put in the Preferences stack?

[tperry2x]

I wonder if that could be put in the Preferences stack?

Righto. No problem. If you check for updates, that should now be there.
Under Preferences > UI Tweaks

Annotation 2025-03-09 094227.png (93.11 KiB) Viewed 11960 times

on-linux.png (77.29 KiB) Viewed 11957 times

[richmond62]

Fantastic!

I've taken the bait

-

Screenshot 2025-03-09 at 13.31.31.png (69.33 KiB) Viewed 11821 times

-

Macintosh_hunting.jpg (22.97 KiB) Viewed 11821 times

-
Not quite as daft as you may have at first thought.

But, give Richmond a yard and he'll demand a mile:
-

more.jpg (5.26 KiB) Viewed 11821 times

-
Can there ALSO be the option to BOLD the font?

Oh, and by the way, 'British Racing Green' has been my favourite colour for 57 years.

[richmond62]

My difficulty is that while I am able to hack the IDE to my heart's content, what I am not able to do is then to implement any of those hacks as options in the Preferences stack:
-

Screenshot 2025-03-09 at 14.20.19.png (132.7 KiB) Viewed 11790 times

[tperry2x]

Hmm... okay.
If you go back into the updates - then choose:

recheck.png (7.32 KiB) Viewed 11749 times

Then you'll have a few more options.
I first added the bold option:

2025-03-09-18-56-31.png (30.74 KiB) Viewed 11749 times

But then, I realised that if you have a wide font (such as "Atkinson Hyperlegible" like I am using here) - then it'll push the labels onto two lines in the inspector. So, to get around that - I also added a font size selector too:

2025-03-09-19-11-50.png (31.7 KiB) Viewed 11749 times

[richmond62]

Screenshot 2025-03-09 at 21.29.17.png (310.19 KiB) Viewed 11740 times

-
Just super!

Thank you very much indeed.

[richmond62]

Now what about the cardColor in the properties palettes?

[tperry2x]

Now what about the cardColor in the properties palettes?

Not being funny, but do you want to group all your possible appearance modifications together - so that I can do them at once, instead of revisiting the same edits? That would really help.
Having said that - this is theming the IDE in an ad-hoc way, which I've ruffled feathers with previously of course.
If I'm going to do that, might as well make it a thing where you can fully override the colours of the entire IDE.

themes.png (290.95 KiB) Viewed 11549 times

experimental-theme.oxtstack

(45.08 KiB) Downloaded 198 times

Or even better, do this all on linux.
Install a system theme you like the look of, then open the IDE (don't change system themes while the IDE is open as it'll crash). That would be the easiest way to work with the IDE in a customised theme:

alt.png (395.34 KiB) Viewed 11461 times

[richmond62]

Follow my 'Grendel' thread and you'll see how ad hoc I am.

[tperry2x]

I'd advocate doing this with the system theme if you want the proper effect, rather than trying to change the IDE:

marsala.png (300.77 KiB) Viewed 11435 times

marsala-blue.png (96.14 KiB) Viewed 11432 times

Or, a combination of both:

combination.png (631.72 KiB) Viewed 11399 times

The world is your oyster.

[richmond62]

Personally I have always prefered mussels to oysters.

The problem with using a system theme is that it is applied universally to all of the IDE windows/cards.

I prefer MOST of the IDE to be fairly "LCC 963", but would like to change the cardColor of the Properties palettes (only).

[tperry2x]

prefer MOST of the IDE to be fairly "LCC 963", but would like to change the cardColor of the Properties palettes (only).

Righto then. Same drill as before, click "re-download" and then restart the IDE, and you'll have that option:

righto-then.png (126.01 KiB) Viewed 11260 times

[richmond62]

SShot 2025-03-10 at 15.16.16.png (214.13 KiB) Viewed 11224 times

-
Incredible!

Same drill as before, click "re-download" and then restart the IDE

Why are you implementing these changes like this, NOT as updates?

[tperry2x]

It's pretty much changing the same file, so rather than re-uploading the same file each time, makes sense just to change it. That also means that people who are just coming to the updates now, aren't having to run 3,4,or 5 updates for seemingly the same thing.
Plus, they are quite minor and quick things to implement.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Ooooh me like... ultra dark brimstone mode

[OpenXTalkPaul]

I believe there's up to eight colors that can be colorized in an inherited property sort of way that's recognized by the engine, they are the colors of an object that you can set all at once with color commands.

Examples

Code: Select all

set the privateColors to true -- "uses engine color table or the system color table on Unix systems." -- unix = linux?
set the colorMap to colorsList

colorList is a line delimited list of RGB color triplets

Inherit colors from the top of the IDE:

Code: Select all

set the colors of this stack to the colors of stack "Home"

colorList provides a method of dealing with all of these colors at once:
Line 1: the foregroundColor
Line 2: the backgroundColor
Line 3: the hiliteColor
Line 4: the borderColor
Line 5: the topColor
Line 6: the bottomColor
Line 7: the shadowColor
Line 8: the focusColor

I suppose you could set 'the colors' of an object to a list of 8 empty lines and that would be the same individually setting all these properties to empty (untested)?

Then there's also DataGrid specific colors if you have stacks using dataGrid (which the IDE does).

Any card controls with color properties set beyond the defaults will override color property inheritance. That's very important if you want to make controls that inherit any colors from the operating system appearance / theme.

Browsing 'color' in the dictionary there's this:
remapColor

Code: Select all

set the remapColor to true

unfortunately:

"Has no effect and is included for compatibility with imported SuperCard projects."

Being that remapColor is probably a reserved keyword stub without an implementation, there may be no way to ad-hoc implement a remapColor property without making changes the engine itself. I hit that limitation when I thought I could implement a scriptTextFont and scriptTextSize properties (global stack properties that HyperCards script editor honored) for OXT's ScriptEditor. I couldn't implement them as global IDE properties, so I made them as commands instead of properties:
scriptTextFont "monaco"
scriptTextSize 11
They work from messagebox .