Wing changed my Windows colours and I can't fix it.

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G'Day.

Something weird happened when I first ran WingIDE 9. It ran using the dark theme which I assume it inherrited form my version 8 install, which is great. Weirdly though, it seems to have somehow pushed some fo those colour settings through to Windows itself. Now I can't really read the tab titles in FireFox as they are too light, the new tab shows up with the Wing background colour, the dropdowns (bookmarks, downloads etc) all have the background colour too.

It's not just FireFox though. Multi Commander is showing the colours in the file lists. Anything that uses a standard Windows file load/save dialog shows the file name box using the colours. In qBitTorrent the filters are hard to read as it's using the bled light forecolor on it's normal white background, and the lists (torrents, contents, RSS feeds etc) are all in the Wing colours.

The most annoying this though, is that I can't work out where on earth Windows has stored these colours so that I can fix it. Windows 10 doesn't seem to let you configure all of the colours like the older Windows used to, it just seems to le me pick light or dark and then a highlight colour.

Any suggestions on how this happened and how to fix it?

Ian_S

asked 2022-11-04 06:30:19 -0600

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This was a bug in 9.0.0.4. The fix for this is to set the User Interface > Display Mode preference back to Emulate Windows, then do Check for Updates from Wing's Help menu, then restart Wing, and after that you can change Display Mode back to Dark Theme again. If any display color settings linger after that, restarting Windows fixes it.

Sorry about that!

4.2k

Wingware Support

answered 2022-11-04 07:55:46 -0600

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I tried to do what you suggested, but it didn't work. There were two problems - 1) I'm already on 9.0.0.5 so there wasn't an update to install. 2) When I switched the Display Mode most of the screen changed, but the list of files in the project and the installed packages tool panels did not change colour. I'm guessing that they are using Windows controls that are getting thier colours from the already damaged Windows colour source. If I change the Mode to Light Theme those panels do change, but other programs don't.

Is there something else I can do? I checked and I still have the 9.0.0.4 installer. Would uninstalling 9.0.0.5, installing 9.0.0.4 and then following the above instructions work, or would the new install see the damage and assume that's ... (more)

Ian_S (2022-11-04 08:53:02 -0600) edit

If you're already on 9.0.0.5 the quickest solution is to reboot Windows. Otherwise, you could downgrade to 9.0.0.4 from the About box, then restart Wing, then follow the above instructions. But on one of my Windows machines I still had some wrong colors and ended up rebooting anyway so that may just be the way to go. The changes were accidentally made by Wing system-wide but those settings are not retained across a reboot.

Wingware Support (2022-11-04 08:55:41 -0600) edit

I've rebooted a couple of times now and it didn't help. I'll try downgrading just on the off chance it helps. If that doesn't fix it maybe I'll try downgrading again and see if I can convince it to the the light theme stuck. At least that will be more readable while I try and find some other fix.

Ian_S (2022-11-04 09:20:42 -0600) edit

Ok, downgrading, changing the mode, and then upgrading again has fixed the problem.

Thanks.

Ian_S (2022-11-04 09:27:13 -0600) edit

G'day. I'm finding that I'm still having this problem each time I reboot my machine. I only reboot every few weeks, so it's not a huge problem. Each time I reboot I have to downgrade WingIDE, set the colour scheme, upgrade again and then set the colour scheme back. I'm worried that at some stage the downgrading will no longer be an option and then I'll be stuck. Given Windows 10 doesn't seem to give me access the colour setting anymore I don't know how to permanently fix this problem. Do you know where Windows is keeping the colours? If not, I guess I can try and get the colour values out of the solarized-dark\python.stx file and try to find those values in the registry manually, but it'll be safer if you know :-)

Ian_S (2023-01-28 08:31:01 -0600) edit

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Wing changed my Windows colours and I can't fix it. edit

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