XYplorer Beta Club

When working with two panes, I would like to have the active pane highlighted in some way for me..

I notice there is a config option to set the active (open) tab colors, as well as other tab colors (background and text).. however, when I set a color for the background and text of the open tab, both tabs in both panes get colored, but only if I use XYplorer classic visual style - no effect when using windows themes. I am not sure the difference between these styles.. it was running windows themes by default when I installed the product.

In any case, what I am looking for is some visual way to identify the active pane when using two panes.. is this possible?

(btw.. RESET COLORS on the Colors & Styles of the Config settings does not seem to work.)

Did you try Settings - Dual Pane - [x] Shade inactive pane?

highend wrote:Did you try Settings - Dual Pane - [x] Shade inactive pane?

Yes, the inactive pane is shaded, but so lightly it is not immediately obvious.

Still does not address the tab colors.. I would prefer to make my active pane really a bright color so it is obvious to me which I am working with. Actually, I would prefer to give the whole pane a background color if that is possible.

Pauleduc wrote:

highend wrote:Did you try Settings - Dual Pane - [x] Shade inactive pane?

Yes, the inactive pane is shaded, but so lightly it is not immediately obvious.

But you know you can define that inactive shade color in Config, right? The Dual Pane setting simply activates it.

Ok, so you can't define active as bright as you want but you can better hide the inactive one...

j_c_hallgren wrote:But you know you can define that inactive shade color in Config, right? The Dual Pane setting simply activates it.
Ok, so you can't define active as bright as you want but you can better hide the inactive one...

Well, let's see... there are only two config options I can see that affect this.. 1) Colors & Styles and 2) Tabs

Firstly, as far as I can see, colors only seem to work if the Tabs Visual Style is set to XYplorer Classic - no colors if set to Windows Themes

So, with that set to XY Classic, I then to to config the Colors & Styles. I set the background color to green for the OPEN TAB and set the background color to red for the OTHER TABS. This only works for tabs within a pane.. so if there are 3 tabs open in a pane, then one (the active one) will be green, and the other two red. The exact same thing happens for the other pane. So, visually, there is not a heck of a lot of difference from one pane to the other.. except if you check off the box in the TABS config for "yellow highlight marks the select tab in classic mode" - in which case the active tab of the selected pane gets a very small sliver of a yellow bar above the tab - almost not noticeable.

I was really looking for something more obvious to indicate which pane is active.. so when I go back to the left column with the tree, I don't accidentally select a folder to display in the wrong pane.

Now if I choose to not use colors (visual style = windows themes), then I seem to have only two choices.. white for active, and light grey for inactive. And no, I was not aware I could change the level of grey.. can't find it.. maybe you can help? I did find a check-box under panes, to "shade inactive pane", but that puts a really light, almost unnoticeable shade of gray and I cannot see how to change this shade. Although with modern color monitors, I would prefer to use color instead of monochrome.

Am I asking too much?

Pauleduc wrote:

j_c_hallgren wrote:But you know you can define that inactive shade color in Config, right? The Dual Pane setting simply activates it.
Ok, so you can't define active as bright as you want but you can better hide the inactive one...

Well, let's see... there are only two config options I can see that affect this.. 1) Colors & Styles and 2) Tabs

[snip]

I was really looking for something more obvious to indicate which pane is active.. so when I go back to the left column with the tree, I don't accidentally select a folder to display in the wrong pane.

Now if I choose to not use colors (visual style = windows themes), then I seem to have only two choices.. white for active, and light grey for inactive. And no, I was not aware I could change the level of grey.. can't find it.. maybe you can help? I did find a check-box under panes, to "shade inactive pane", but that puts a really light, almost unnoticeable shade of gray and I cannot see how to change this shade. Although with modern color monitors, I would prefer to use color instead of monochrome.

Am I asking too much?

Under Colors & Styles, on the far right side is "Inactive Pane" -- I believe that is what you're looking for...

I hope this helps!

andy

Yep, that's it.. thanks. Don't know how I missed it.. was on that settings page many times.

So, I set the inactive pane color, however now is only displays this color on alternate lines and looks gawd-awful.. probably because I had set an option to shade alternate lines, but now I just can't find where I did that or how to turn it off.. ideas?

On a positive note, I just bought the package at 50% off from BitsDuJour.. thanks for the pointer to this offer!

Pauleduc wrote:So, I set the inactive pane color, however now is only displays this color on alternate lines and looks gawd-awful.. probably because I had set an option to shade alternate lines, but now I just can't find where I did that or how to turn it off.. ideas?

That sounds like zebra-striping, which was overhauled recently. You're probably looking to disable Tools > Customize List > Show Grid, while Configuration > Colors & Styles > Grid Style, allow you to set further grid options should you want to continue using it in some other way.

I'd like to jump onto this discussion please.

I've got my inactive panel background set to a rather dark grey and have zebra striping turned on.
However this looks awful in my inactive panel with some lines dark grey but alternates white.
I want to keep zebra striping turned on as it helps me to follow the file list row on my wide monitors.
Turning zebra striping off isn't an option as it turns it off in the active pane as well.

I think that we need an option here to either:
- define more colours for the inactive panel
- turn off zebra striping in the inactive panel (whilst leaving it on for the active panel)
- FAVOURITE: dim the inactive panel, irrelevant of colours and other options (so everything looks more faded / translucent)

From reading various discussions around the forum, it seems like quite a few people are having trouble getting the inactive panel to look inactive (me included) and a few more options would help everyone enormously.

We will soon get breadcrumbs for each pane. They will offer an additional hint as to the active/inactive pane.

Would be still nice to get all of the other options as well.

Dimming the inactive panel has to be the right way to go

clarkedesign wrote:Would be still nice to get all of the other options as well.

Dimming the inactive panel has to be the right way to go

Not sure. When I work with panes I don't want anything dimmed. I have an egalitarian approach to dual pane.

Apart from that: Dimming a whole window (a pane is a window technically) is not a function I know. And I have no plans to write it.