How to customise UI Colors

I wonder of anyone could help me with a problem I have had for awhile which is now getting annoying.

I have cataracts in both eyes which makes the reading and editing of SL scripts and notecards a literally painful experience with the default colour options in the UI. I normally resort to copy pasting important text out into an external editor with the flexibility too customise its colours to my requirements.

However this gets very tiresome especially if the client is running full screen, rather than windowed.

Having poked around I discovered the color_base.xml file and dutifully copied likely looking definitions into colors.xml for editing.

I have succeeded in making notecard reading a pleasurable experience (a black background with green text colour). But whatever I try I cannot get the text colours for scripts to change from the default orange/blue/grey combination, although the background has changed to my new black definition in colors.xml which makes reading scripts somewhat difficult lol !

Does anyone know where the script editor stores its font colours ? I don't want fancy combinations - just a nice green over the black background would be fine for all the text.

Free Tangle hugs to anyone who can help me and my poor eyes - thank you for reading

The script editor has a file C:\Program Files\Secondlife\skins\xui\en-us\floater_script_ed_panel.xml .

I haven't figured out how to deal with the script editor text color, I suspect the syntax highlighting makes this more difficult to deal with.

Perhaps this is something the open source client programmers can deal with. Secondlife.exe could sure use some accessibility improvement.

I'll post a link to this thread in the opensl irc channel.

While waiting for an answer to how to adjust the script editor font colors, you might benefit from using Client Debug Settings to adjust the size of the monospace font, which setting is named FontSizeMonospace. I believe this change requires a restart to take effect. This will affect other places in the UI that use the monospaced font, you will have to judge if this will suit your needs. Changing this value from it's default size of 9 to 14 makes the script editor and notecard editor have much larger text. You would probably want to experiment with small changes and work your way up. One specific area where this will definitely cause a problem is in the various debug information consoles like the texture console. The texture console uses the monospaced font and uses fixed positioning for the character placement, unfortunately, so the enlarged characters overlap. However, you may not use these information displays and thus not be bothered by this problem in the least.

Also, you might try adjusting the UI Size in Edit Preferences Graphics tab UI Size.

Thank you for a very informative reply SuzanneC, I must admit I was starting to think the script editor generated its colours 'on the fly'. Oh well I will just have to stick to the external editor route, at least my notecards are readable !

See me in game for your free hugs

I gota admit the SL UI is sorta boring after a while. It's straight and to the point, but after being here 2 years looking at it, i want something different hehe. I beleive it should be customizable. Even if not a entire new interface, atleast the ability to change the colors of the buttons, and windows. Or pick from a selection of different button designs. I know the colors can be changed by editing a file, but i beleive this should be available through the options panel in SL.

Perhaps since the client side is now open source, we can have that. Duno.. Depends on how the code is used. I did find a file in the SL directory that had a bunch of UUID keys called veiwerart.xml i think. But when i tried to change them, they didn't take effect. I even uploaded my own button textures hoping they would work hehe. Ah well...