Syntax highlighting colors of wordfiles lost after update

[coda]

Bit of a problem, really. Having spent ages tweaking colour schemes for syntax highlighting, a minor update has modified uestudio.ini and reverted to default colors (which really don't work on a black background). During install it claimed to save copies of old menus and wordfiles yet I can't seem to find them - is there a backup of these settings being created or not?

Edit 5 minutes later: Nevermind, found the backup directory and restoring the wordfiles fixed it. Cheers.

[Mofi]

Just for your information: the color and font style settings for a syntax highlighting language are not saved anymore in the INI file, they are saved in the syntax highlighting wordfile as many user requested. So be careful with updating of standard wordfiles even when you have not modified the content of the standard wordfiles manually. They contain your color and font style settings.

[rhapdog]

Nevermind, found the backup directory and restoring the wordfiles fixed it. Cheers.

The only problem there is that if IDM actually has "changes" made to the "newer" versions of the word files and you would like those new changes for enhanced productivity, then you have to lose your colors and start over.

I think we need to send in requests to IDM to have their "update process" do a "backup" of current word file syntax highlighting per word file, then install the new word files, then copy the syntax highlighting to the new word files from the old word files, so that configurations are not lost while at the same time we get the updated files. This is not a difficult task, as Mofi has shown with his macros that strip and add word file colors, and with my utility program that saves the colors and updates the colors.

[bulgrien]

I agree that new elements should be merged into existing wordfiles. However, when it comes to color scheme's, I personally believe that such a request would simply be a patch or work-around to something that would not even be an issue if more thought had been put into how color scheme's are managed in UE. I realize that users requested the ability to manage separate color schemes for different file types...but the implementation of it was short-sighted in my opinion. While merging new changes into a wordfile without overwriting the user’s color scheme would be better that what we have today, it would still be a short-sighted implementation. There are many editors that make multiple color scheme's available right out-of-the-box. By comparison, UE's ability to manage color scheme's is cumbersome and awkward at best. Instead of treating the symptoms of a poorly designed color management system, we should be asking for a smarter solution for managing color schemes.

Personally I don't think that the color scheme belongs in the wordfile. A better solution would be to have a config file dedicated to color scheme's and give the user the ability save and name multiple color schemes in the dedicated config file. Wordfiles could simply contain the name of the color scheme to apply to the respective file types. This would make it even easier to update a wordfile without losing the user's color scheme as only the name of the color scheme need be preserved, not the color scheme itself. Alternately, the color scheme config file could have a list of a user’s file types with the assigned color scheme right in the config file. This would eliminate the need to preserve color scheme information in the wordfiles altogether. Having color schemes saved in a separate config file would also make it easier for users to pass around their collections of favorite color schemes.

There should be a View drop-down menu option that allows a user to select a color scheme from a drop-down list containing the names of all the color scheme's in that user's color scheme config file. There should be a checkbox to allow the user to assign the newly applied color scheme as the default. Additionally, one of the options in the drop-down box should be "default color scheme" to allow a user to set a wordfile back to using the "default" color scheme, whatever it may be. This would allow users that want a common look and feel between file types to simply point the wordfiles to the default color scheme so that, when they change the default color scheme, the changes are automatically adopted by the other file types as well.

[rhapdog]

bulgrien, I couldn't agree with you more on your thoughts here.