Color of selected files in the inactive panel.

[pmennen]

The color setup for MC is about as complicated as any application I have used, but since I am picky about the colors for the applications I use most I appreciate the flexibility to control the colors so precisely. After much fiddling, I've gotten the colors to look exactly like I wanted, except for one small problem. I've chosen purple as the color of the files that have been selected. When the panel containing the selected files becomes inactive the color changes from purple to some other color. That behavior seems entirely appropriate, but the problem is: "how is that color chosen?". Right now the color chosen for that is so faint that I can hardly even read it. I would like to change it to a subtle color to make it obvious that it no longer is active - but not so subtle that I can't even read it (as in the current situation).

Since the color selections are so varied, I have attached a screen capture showing the color setting dialogs. I have marked this up to show the colors that I have entered for the respective choices. And BTW I used the alternating background colors selections because I liked how obvious it made it to tell at a glance which panel was the active one and which one was inactive.

And finally one other related question. Although the purple color is bright enough to make the selected files stand out, I was thinking of ways to make them even more obvious. One way I thought to try was to use a bold face font for the selected files. I noticed that I could select bold face for just about every file type, but the selected files themselves couldn't be set to bold. That seems strange to me, since of all the file names on the panel, the selected files are the ones where bold face would seem the most appropriate, yet these are the only files that may not be set to bold. Am I missing something there?

Thanks
~Paul

[Mathias (Author)]

Yes color configurations are complicated.. There are too much to change..  and it used to be even more.

I've chosen purple as the color of the files that have been selected. When the panel containing the selected files becomes inactive the color changes from purple to some other color.

Hmm Are you sure. the background will change since you have different color for background of active/inactive.. Colors can look difference if the background are change.  The Text Color should not change depending on active/inactive. Only time colors are changed is by Color Rules or to emulate Explorer if Explorer Mode is active..(But that will only affect selected items, they get "faded" when panel is not in focus.. .)

Since the color selections are so varied, I have attached a screen capture showing the color setting dialogs. I have marked this up to show the colors that I have entered for the respective choices. And BTW I used the alternating background colors selections because I liked how obvious it made it to tell at a glance which panel was the active one and which one was inactive.

That is the "Highlight the background on panel in focus" settings. The Alternating background settings so for different color for odd/even rows.
Since you have same color for Alternating background color.. you can disable the "Alternating background color" it should not change a thing.

And finally one other related question. Although the purple color is bright enough to make the selected files stand out, I was thinking of ways to make them even more obvious. One way I thought to try was to use a bold face font for the selected files. I noticed that I could select bold face for just about every file type, but the selected files themselves couldn't be set to bold. That seems strange to me, since of all the file names on the panel, the selected files are the ones where bold face would seem the most appropriate, yet these are the only files that may not be set to bold. Am I missing something there?

It's architectural.  The normal coloring system can not do that. And it is already to complex.
but it will be possible in the future. More of the coloring system will be controlled by the Color Rules instead and it will get support for assigning rules to different file states. So then it can be overridden there.

[pmennen]

Hmm Are you sure. the background will change since you have different color for background of active/inactive.. Colors can look difference if the background are change.  The Text Color should not change depending on active/inactive.

The attached picture shows the appearance change between the active and inactive states.
Perhaps you call the color of the selected file the same in both panels, but to my 61 year old eyes the letters in the inactive panel are so faded out that I can barely even tell what the characters are not to mention tell what color they are. I'm surprised you chose such a strong "faded" factor for the inactive color. Then again your eyes may have many fewer years on them than mine

Only time colors are changed is by Color Rules or to emulate Explorer if Explorer Mode is active..(But that will only affect selected items, they get "faded" when panel is not in focus.. .)

I guess you are suggesting that I can disable the problematic fading out of the characters by switching from explorer mode to commander mode. But is there any other way to solve the problem? I have been using the windows style right click, F5 for refresh, ... etc. for decades and I may be too set in my ways to reprogram myself to use the commander styles which I have never been exposed to.

~Paul

[Mathias (Author)]

Ahh Okey so you are running Explorer Mode that explains it. Yes that will fade colors of selected in inactive panel.
The fade factor is the around the same as Explorer Uses. But there you can not tweaked the color so much so you do not see that.
Normally the The Background is getting lighter and text darker. But with your configuration that is not happening since you disabled items specific background so the background for the item is not changing. Making the fade effect bad.. (Also purple on black might be a bad combo )

Sorry. the Explorer Fade effect for selected item cannot  be tweaked.

Going CommanderStyle might not be a solution for you. However you can use the same hotkeys as Explorer if you want. But CommanderStyle setup also handles mouse actions a lot different.

Not sure.. But you can try to enable item specific background and then check "Use default background color" for all items..
Then maybe the background for the selected also is faded.

[pmennen]

Normally the Background is getting lighter and text darker. But with your configuration that is not happening since you disabled items specific background so the background for the item is not changing. Making the fade effect bad..

Early on I disabled items specific backgrounds because that made the already complex color settings even harder to wrap my brain around, but now I see that this is actually needed to get an acceptable windows mode color scheme. So thanks for that suggestion. After a little experimentation with it I converged onto a pleasing color scheme. I still have no control over the way the selected files look in inactive mode, however the default (despite having a somewhat unexpected look that I wouldn't have chosen) was never-the-less quite readable. So I'm now happy with the color scheme and believe it was worth the work to understand the MC coloer settings.

Thanks again for your patience.

~Paul

[Mathias (Author)]

I will see if I can add an option for disabling the fade thing.
I try not too add more setting around the color since there are already to many, and also because there are so many there so there is a risk that when adding something, something else will break. Specially here where a lot of settings are connected. But I think that an option for disabling fade should, possible, maybe, be safe to add.

[pmennen]

I will see if I can add an option for disabling the fade thing.
I try not too add more setting around the color since there are already to many, and also because there are so many there so there is a risk that when adding something, something else will break. Specially here where a lot of settings are connected. But I think that an option for disabling fade should, possible, maybe, be safe to add.

That will be nice ... although looking at the enhancements section of the forum I suspect there are some higher priority items

If you decide to tackle this one however, I think I have a suggestion for you that will have almost no impact on the user interface. In the File Coloring Rules Editor you have an "Attributes" field with 17 possible values ranging from archive to placeholder field. Simply add three more:
1.) focus
2.) selected
3.) active panel

I believe that will also allow you to remove the eight "File and Folder state colors" in the explorer panel settings, thus simplifying and unifying the overall color selection interface.

One other minor idea for the explorer panel settings color page is to group the Active panel alternating background color and the inactive panel alternating background color selections underneath the checkbox "Alternating Background color". My reasoning is that with the current ordering it is not obvious that the two Background color selections apply when the alternating background color box is not checked. This had me confused for some time. Also it is not clear to me that you really need the first checkbox (Highlight the background on panel in focus). If you decided you didn't want such highlighting, couldn't you just set the background color of the inactive panel to be the same as the background color of the active panel? Yes, one more color selection you have to make (if you don't want highlighting) but still you benifit from a simpler easier to understand interface. If you decide to keep this checkbox, shouldn't it say "active panel" instead of "panel in focus". (You usually use the word "focus" for files not panels.)

The reason I'm offering all these suggestions is that I suspect there is a significant fraction of your users that have looked at the color selection interface and have given up trying to understand it, thus marginalizing a large fraction of your wonderful effort.

~Paul

[Mathias (Author)]

I will see if I can add an option for disabling the fade thing.
I try not too add more setting around the color since there are already to many, and also because there are so many there so there is a risk that when adding something, something else will break. Specially here where a lot of settings are connected. But I think that an option for disabling fade should, possible, maybe, be safe to add.

That will be nice ... although looking at the enhancements section of the forum I suspect there are some higher priority items

Option for enable/disable fade should be a easy and fast and low risk.. (I Think)

If you decide to tackle this one however, I think I have a suggestion for you that will have almost no impact on the user interface. In the File Coloring Rules Editor you have an "Attributes" field with 17 possible values ranging from archive to placeholder field. Simply add three more:
1.) focus
2.) selected
3.) active panel

I believe that will also allow you to remove the eight "File and Folder state colors" in the explorer panel settings, thus simplifying and unifying the overall color selection interface.

No that will not work. File Attributes and View state are totally different, A file can be shown in many view. And they can all have different view state.
But View states are coming to Rule based file coloring, But in another way

One other minor idea for the explorer panel settings color page is to group the Active panel alternating background color and the inactive panel alternating background color selections underneath the checkbox "Alternating Background color". My reasoning is that with the current ordering it is not obvious that the two Background color selections apply when the alternating background color box is not checked. This had me confused for some time. Also it is not clear to me that you really need the first checkbox (Highlight the background on panel in focus). If you decided you didn't want such highlighting, couldn't you just set the background color of the inactive panel to be the same as the background color of the active panel? Yes, one more color selection you have to make (if you don't want highlighting) but still you benifit from a simpler easier to understand interface. If you decide to keep this checkbox, shouldn't it say "active panel" instead of "panel in focus". (You usually use the word "focus" for files not panels.)

I Know. I had it like that before. But it did not look good.
My plan is that when the Checkbox is enable. The alternating background boxes become enabled, and when checkbox is disabled.. they are also disabled

The reason I'm offering all these suggestions is that I suspect there is a significant fraction of your users that have looked at the color selection interface and have given up trying to understand it, thus marginalizing a large fraction of your wonderful effort.

I been playing with the idea to create a step by step wizard.

[pmennen]

No that will not work. File Attributes and View state are totally different, A file can be shown in many view. And they can all have different view state.

I did realize that the view state is not really the same thing as the file attributes ... although I thought it still might work for them to be in the same place. By putting the view states first in the attributes rule list it would override the later file attributes settings. That could be all wrong of course. Clearly I haven't thought about the problem as much as you have

I been playing with the idea to create a step by step wizard.

That sounds like a lot of work. Also not everybody will appreciate the wizard. Wizards work fine when the user actually knows what they want, but for color schemes users rarely know what they want right away, and running the wizard over and over again probably would be too painful. I suspect you will be better off sticking with your current method and maybe making a few simplifications and clarifications in the organization. I think your time would be better spend adding a collection of example color schemes with directions for how to achieve that result. (Perhaps a config file next to a screen capture would be sufficient). Try to solicit these examples from your users many of which will have quite divergent ideas of what looks good. I would certainly be willing to contribute my color scheme, which I worked pretty hard on and am quite proud of how good it looks.

~Paul

[Mathias (Author)]

No that will not work. File Attributes and View state are totally different, A file can be shown in many view. And they can all have different view state.

I did realize that the view state is not really the same thing as the file attributes ... although I thought it still might work for them to be in the same place. By putting the view states first in the attributes rule list it would override the later file attributes settings. That could be all wrong of course. Clearly I haven't thought about the problem as much as you have

It might have worked if the color was evaluated from the rules every time the item was drawn. But that would be slow. Rule based file coloring does a lot of caching and other things. But I have some  idea for it. If I get the time

I been playing with the idea to create a step by step wizard.

That sounds like a lot of work. Also not everybody will appreciate the wizard. Wizards work fine when the user actually knows what they want, but for color schemes users rarely know what they want right away, and running the wizard over and over again probably would be too painful. I suspect you will be better off sticking with your current method and maybe making a few simplifications and clarifications in the organization. I think your time would be better spend adding a collection of example color schemes with directions for how to achieve that result. (Perhaps a config file next to a screen capture would be sufficient). Try to solicit these examples from your users many of which will have quite divergent ideas of what looks good. I would certainly be willing to contribute my color scheme, which I worked pretty hard on and am quite proud of how good it looks.

Wizard is and idea I played with in my head. Will probably never get the time to add it.

I been planing do add more information about how to customize in the documentation. But writing documentation are boring and takes a lot more time then you think. So it have not happened yet.

I do accept color themes to be added as presets in the quick setup.

[Mathias (Author)]

In the latest Beta build (build 1999) there is now a setting that will turn of the fading