Changing the Colors

WinEdt's Default settings are suitable for the default Windows appearance. However, if you are using dark background you may want to change the basic 16 colors used in WinEdt's Highlighting Schemes. This can be done in the Options: Preferences/ Colors Dialog:

You can customize the background and font color as well as the highlighting attributes of the selected text. The Help in the Dialog will guide you if you need more assistance.

If you want to tune or change the 16-colors used in the 4x4 color grid, right-click inside the color group (but outside the grid since right-clicking on the grid changes the background mode for the current selection) and choose the "Change Colors" item in the resulting context popup menu. This brings up the Windows common colors dialog:

Click on the Custom Color you want to change, make the adjustments and press the "Add to Custom Colors" button. You have to repeat the procedure for each custom color you want to modify. If you make a mistake or you don't quite like the result you can either cancel the dialog or else restore the default colors from the context menu above.

You may also want to change or adjust the default highlighting attributes. This is done in the Options/ Highlighting Dialog. Setting up new highlighting schemes may require some some planning but changing the colors or font attributes of the existing switches or reserved words is quite straightforward.

Suppose you want to change the default color of TeX Comments from Gray to Dark Blue. Start the Highlighting Dialog:

Search for the item "%TeX Comment" in the list of all Switches. Click on the new preferred foreground color. You can also change the background color by right-clicking on the selected color cell. For your convenience you can preview your selection(s) in the Sample edit control.

The Help in the Highlighting Dialog will guide you if you need more assistance. New and unexperienced users are not advised to make extensive changes to the default highlighting scheme unless they read the documentation and are aware of the consequences...