IDE colors and font size. How to change?

[OhioJim]

Does anyone know how to change the font size and color on the IDE?

I find the tiny red characters on a black background almost impossible to read. Red on black has very poor contrast, unless the characters are quite large.

I see that I can change the font size in the edit window, but it does not stick. I have to redo it every time I open the IDE.

[KurtE]

I assume you are meaning the Arduino IDE.

Have you tried going to File->Preferences

And played with the settings like: Editor Font Size:
And Interface Scale:

And at least on windows and assuming your mouse has scroll wheel,
You can use the CTRL+mouse wheel to change the size

One thing I find strange and annoying, And maybe it is something screwy on my machine or some strange setting.

But I will have times, that I do something and all of the Arduino windows font changes on me to some really really small. And then I can usually recover reasonably by using the above scroll wheel and go up and down to get back to something reasonable.

And when I say do something. It can often be something like I do a build and the build fails with an error and all of the windows screw up...

[OhioJim]

I was not aware of using CTRL+mouse wheel. That does change the font size.

In preferences there are 2 items for color, but I do not know what those are for (what color?) or how to change them. I do not want to change anything that I am unsure of.

[reddude]

you can easily change the colors in preferences and its very easy !

[OhioJim]

you can easily change the colors in preferences and its very easy !

How???? If it was easy I would have figured it out by now.

I am, as I type this on my laptop, looking at the Preferences window on my desktop.

There is NOTHING about font size and color. There is a pull-down menu for Theme, but it has only one entry which is the default.

And I do not have a problem with the editor pane, but the message pane at the bottom.

[mborgerson]

To modify the bottom part of the Arduino IDE, you need to edit the Theme.txt file which is at:

C:\arduino-1.8.13\lib\theme\theme.txt (Arduino was placed at C:\ on my machine)

Here is the edited part that controls the bottom pane (Console) and makes it use black text on white background:

# GUI - CONSOLE
console.font = Consolas,plain,12
console.font.macosx = Monaco,plain,10
console.color = #FFFFFF
console.output.color = #000000
console.error.color = #E34C00

In the sludge at the bottom of my memory is an old theory that programmers sometimes used low-contrast color pairs for console output because less expensive CRT-based monitors did not respond well to large changes in screen brightness due to poor black-level restoration circuits. Why low-contrast color pairs are still the default in the Arduino IDE in the 2020s is a mystery to me. The first thing I do with each new version of Arduino is to modify theme.txt to make the console black on white.

[OhioJim]

To modify the bottom part of the Arduino IDE, you need to edit the Theme.txt file which is at:

C:\arduino-1.8.13\lib\theme\theme.txt (Arduino was placed at C:\ on my machine)

Here is the edited part that controls the bottom pane (Console) and makes it use black text on white background:

# GUI - CONSOLE
console.font = Consolas,plain,12
console.font.macosx = Monaco,plain,10
console.color = #FFFFFF
console.output.color = #000000
console.error.color = #E34C00

In the sludge at the bottom of my memory is an old theory that programmers sometimes used low-contrast color pairs for console output because less expensive CRT-based monitors did not respond well to large changes in screen brightness due to poor black-level restoration circuits. Why low-contrast color pairs are still the default in the Arduino IDE in the 2020s is a mystery to me. The first thing I do with each new version of Arduino is to modify theme.txt to make the console black on white.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

I'll play around with it and see what colors I like.

It is not so much the white on black (although the font could be larger), but the red letters on black for an error. Red/Black is the worst possible combination because of poor contrast.

[KurtE]

Note: if you do a search on web you will find several places that talk about changing the color schemes...
Example: https://www.instructables.com/IDE-Ar...th-Dark-Theme/