I am new to using Arduino. I just recently installed the IDE on a windows 10 machine. I am having a good deal of difficulty working with the IDE, the font and colors are terrible - I have a difficult time seeing what I am typing. I have found no way to customize these settings.
There is absolutely no differentiation between comments, regular lines of code, function/method names, keywords, or variables. And everything is so washed out it is difficult to see.
Is there some way to customize the user experience, or failing that is there any alternative IDEs that can be used?
It is possible to do a lot of customization of the Arduino IDE. I have attempted to document this here:
That repository also contains a dummy library that can be used to test your theme changes to ensure there is sufficient contrast between the various colors.
There are also some premade themes available here:
and here:
grggraham:
There is absolutely no differentiation between comments, regular lines of code, function/method names, keywords, or variables.
That should not be happening. With the default theme comments are gray (two different shades, lighter for C style comments, darker for C++ style comments), regular text is black. The functions and keywords of the Arduino API and common C++ language are all in various colors. Libraries define their own keywords, though some 3rd party library authors don't bother to do that and so their functions will just be colored black.
I wonder if your code has an open C comment at the top, causing everything to be colored as a comment?
MH208c:
My IDE font only displays blue and black, no orange or gray. What do I have to do to correct this?
Paste this into your IDE:
/* C comment */
// C++ comment
Ethernet //KEYWORD1
digitalWrite() //KEYWORD2
JOYSTICK_BASE //LITERAL1
Serial //DATA_TYPE
#include //PREPROCESSOR
HIGH //RESERVED_WORD_2
if //RESERVED_WORD
asdfsadf //regular text
You should see a nice variety of colors:
If you don't see that then post a screenshot and also which IDE version you're using.
Then the Arduino IDE is working correctly for you.
What were you seeing before that was not colored as you expected? Keywords for 3rd party libraries will sometimes not be colored because the author either didn't bother to create a keywords.txt file for the library or did it wrong. Keywords for names defined in your own code will not be colored either unless you go through the trouble of making a keywords.txt file for them, which is not really worth the effort. The colors of the code really doesn't matter. What's important is that it compiles and works correctly.
MH208c:
even the basic start language is just blue and black
No, look more carefully. It's teal, dark olive green, gray, and black, just as intended.
MH208c:
Void should be orange.
Why should void be orange? It's teal just like all the other standard types.
MH208c:
the // comments are black instead of gray.
No, actually they're a dark gray. Put a // comment right above standard text and you'll see the difference.
Why are you so obsessed about colors? I already told you they don't matter. If you really care then you're free to change any colors you like by following the documentation here:
If you want to change specific keywords you will find the keywords definitions for the standard language keywords and the Arduino API keywords at lib/keywords.txt inside your Arduino IDE installation folder. Each library will also have a keywords.txt file in its root folder.
Yes, the contrast could be better but at least it's possible to modify it to our own preferences. It's actually kind of tricky to find colors that are readable, unique, and have good contrast against the background colors (selected, unselected, error highlight, console). I was only trying to update some older themes to work with the current IDE versions and ran into that problem. That was just trying to modify a couple properties in themes that other people created instead of making one theme from scratch.
