colors important vs unimportant in overview gutter to the left to close

[jod]

Hi

It is quite hard to distinguish between important and unimportant colors in the overview, unfortunately these colors can not? be changed
or at least it is not clear how to change them

Maybe they follow text foreground color, but thange to the foreground color did not have any effect (though I pressed apply without effect on the overview gutter I did not try to restart BC4)

Any way I do not really want to change the text foreground color only the over view colors, could you provide separate settings for the overview colors?

Thanks Jens

[Aaron]

Hello,

The color customization you are looking for is in the Options dialog -> Colors,Fonts section -> Files Views tab, Compare Colors>Difference Line (Important and Unimportant colors here).

Which colors would you be changing to? Would you also alter the Merge colors (Left, Right, Center, and Conflict changes each have Important and Unimportant)?

[jod]

Hi

Options dialog -> Colors,Fonts section -> Files Views tab, Compare Colors>Difference Line
is NOT the color I am looking for I conlude this from the fact that the configure colors i not the colors show

Maybe I was a bit unclear in my explanation, what I was refering to is the colors used in the overview bar to the far left the default color values are red and orange, I would probably change the orange to a lighter orange or yellow

Thanks Jens

[Aaron]

Hello,

The View menu -> Thumbnail preview pane on the far left uses the same colors as the 'Difference Line' in the color customization. We currently use Red for Important and an Orange for Unimportant. If you change the orange to a different color, then this will change the background of the line in the main compare window, and in the Thumbnail preview on the left.

If this is not the area you are referring to, could you post or email us at [email protected] with a screenshot?

Our default color scheme is universal across the Text Compare and Text Merge. The Merge specifically has a different color for each pane, and uses a lighter shade of that color for Unimportant differences. If you have a suggested alternate color scheme, please let us know. We'd be grateful for the feedback during the beta.

[mlippert255]

For me, using a lighter version of the important change color to signify unimportant changes is not working.

When there are a lot of unimportant changes surrounding a small important change, it's hard to see that there is an important change mixed in w/ the unimportant changes.

Now when merging, this is less of an issue than when reviewing the diffs between 2 files.

For now anyway, I think I'm going to just change the unimportant difference color to some version of blue, attempting to go back to how it showed in BC v3. I'm going to leave the merging color scheme alone, and see if it bothers me the next couple of merge I have to do (that's not so frequent so it will be a while before I have an opinion).

It would be nice to know what color values are the defaults for BC v4 so I can reset them if I don't like my changes as much as I thought.

Mike

[Chris]

To restore default color schemes in Beyond Compare 4, select "Tools > Restore Factory Defaults". Check "Program Colors" and uncheck all other boxes, then click Next and Finish.

[Chris]

Here's how to set the color scheme for unimportant text in the Text Compare closer to BC3's blue color scheme:

Select "Tools > Options".
Go to the "Colors, Fonts" section.
Go to the File Views tab.
In Compare Colors > Unimportant Difference", click the Text Color dropdown.
Select a deep blue color.
In "Compare Colors > Difference Line", click the Unimportant dropdown.
Select a light blue color.

We're actually considering going back to the BC3 blue color scheme for unimportant text before the final release of Beyond Compare 4.

For anyone else reading this thread, is there anyone who prefers the orange color for unimportant text as used in the current version of BC4 beta over the blue color scheme of BC3?

[goldsy]

Changing the colors back to the BC3 scheme was the first tweak that I made to BC4 within the first hour of using it. There simply isn't enough contrast. [Edit: I'm referring to the unimportant text color here]

Additionally I changed the background color for differences back to the BC3 pink/blue. It was just too hard to pick out significant and insignificant differences both in the gutter and in the file. I assume that the background color change to slightly different shades of the same color was so that users could pick out both significance and source (left, center, right) in a file merge, but there just wasn't enough contrast for me so I changed it back in the file compare. I don't use merge often (although it has saved me a lot of time when I have needed it) so I've left the background colors as the BC4 default there for now.

Thanks for listening to our input!

[tfrost]

Another vote for the v3 scheme. I had retained the v4 defaults through laziness, but goldsy's post spurred me to compare v3 in detail, and I much prefer it for file comparison. I have now tweaked v4 to match it.

[Chris]

Thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it. We've scheduled time to discuss the unimportant text color scheme here in the office. Right now we're considering either making the default unimportant color blue like BC3 or adding a BC3 color preset for those that prefer BC3 colors.

[mlippert255]

Thanks for the info on how to restore the defaults as well as how to set the colors for unimportant differences close to the BC3 scheme.

Also thanks for actually listening to our opinions!

Mike

[mlippert255]

FYI, After the last BC4 update where I saw in the changelog that you had tweaked the default colors, I reset to the factory defaults. Thanks for returning to the blue/red scheme, the contrast between the 2 makes it much easier to find one mixed in w/ a lot of the other.

[Aaron]

Thanks. We're still looking for feedback/ideas in for the other views (Registry Compare, Text/Folder Merge). We're trying to reconcile the conflicts, especially in cases where colors can be specific to a side.