Color guide?

[jkoseattle]

The dialog for changing individual colors of things needs a great deal of improvement. Any time I need to change the color of something, I grab a scotch and open the preferences color dialog and hope to god I can find the one I'm looking for.  There are way way WAY too many of them (I ask you, how many of us need to change the color of the Clips Pane Ellipse....?), and the only way to effectively search for them is to try and GUESS what the developers decided to call it. And the stakes are pretty high. If I can't see something because it's the wrong color, I could end up making dumb mistakes, Add to that this bizarre combination of choosing the color itself, and then ALSO being able to change the hue, saturation, etc. It's terribly confusing. We've got shit to do here, please make this easy on us.

All I want to do is mess with the vertical lines in PRV. Search for LINE or BEAT or whatever, and then you have to guess which it is, the only way to know is to drag sliders around, which then changes whatever wrong one you just changed.... NIGHTMARE!

And before someone responds with "Just choose one of their supplied color palettes", well of course. But everyone has their own personal must-have, and while those palettes are a great starting point, I'm talking about when something in the palette is wrong enough that one needs to go adjust something.

Is there some handy guide somewhere that indicates what things are called in the colors dialog?

Edited October 29, 2021 by jkoseattle

[tecknot]

Hi jkoseattle,

Sounds to me like you are using the Colors option in Preferences rather than using the Theme Editor.  In the Theme Editor you will find that is well organized and descriptive than the Colors option.  Also, when you make a change in the Theme Editor that does not change the item you were hoping for, you can easily delete the change and it will revert back to its original color(s).

Check out the UI Themes forum for more info https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/forum/31-ui-themes/ (particularly Cloin Nicholls', "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to Theming Cakewalk")

Kind regards,

tecknot

[jkoseattle]

Thanks so much!!! I will check this out. What with Themes and Workspaces and Layouts and Multidocks and palettes and modules, things can get pretty lost...

[Starship Krupa]

Vertical Beat Lines and Vertical Measure Lines are the color settings for grid rules in the Track View. Those colors can't be set in a custom theme, and I find them pretty important.

For most other things, I like using custom themes, of which I've made half a dozen for public use.

The aforementioned Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is the best resource for anyone wishing to change colors (or even button art) in Cakewalk.