Use of development system

I am new to the ARDUINO and wish to develop applications related railway signalling operation. A major problem for me is that being old (77+) I have difficulty in reading text which uses various colours or intensities: for example, The standard development platform uses different intensities for comments and statements and program WORDS, even this page has a yellow box round it which I can hardly see. It would be nice to have it all in black on white. Any suggestions (Jokes accepted if they are really funny)

Could you maybe write your code in Notepad, which is black text on a white background. This would also (I think) allow you to increase the text size, and then copy and paste it into the Arduino environment to run it?

Although, debugging could still be an issue I guess.

Seán

The syntax highlighting is at least partially driven by "keywords.txt" files. Each library includes one. Rename the files, restart the IDE, highlighting gone.

In addition, there are many display options in the "preferences.txt" file.

You can also set the IDE to use an external editor (so no need to cut and paste) and then used something like Notepad++ (great editor). In NP you just change the font size with the mouse wheel.


Rob

Look into NetBeans IDE. I have not used it for Arduino (yet) but use it for almost all my PHP applications. You can customize the IDE interface setting your own colors, fount size, background etc.

NetBeans also add features like auto complete and bracketing for the code.

You can set NetBeans to save the "shetch" in the same location as the Arduino IDE would, and add the same file extension. Then to upload just fire off The Arduino IDE and open the file.

Have a look:

Thank-you everyone for your observations/advice. I think I will go down the external editor route to start with.