Where in the world is the BackgroundColor?

Hi Mike,

Everything in SyntaxEditor is rendered with its renderer.  If you didn't set a custom one and want to modify various background area properties, you can do so with lines like this:

var renderer = (VisualStudio2005SyntaxEditorRenderer)editor.RendererResolved;
renderer.TextAreaBackgroundFill = new ActiproSoftware.Drawing.SolidColorBackgroundFill(Color.Black);

In your language definition XML file:

<Styles>
   <Style Key="DefaultStyle" ForeColor="White" BackColor="Black" />
   <Style Key="KeywordStyle" ForeColor="White" BackColor="Blue" Bold="True" />
   <Style Key= ... />
</Styles>

You can also set other properties such as BorderStyle, etc.

In code you can use:

Dim style As NewHighlightingStyle("DefaultStyle", "Text", Color.Black, Color.White)
myLang.HighlightingStyles.Add(style)

You can also set the background color for a section of code [Span]:

ProtectedSpan = NewReadOnlySpanIndicator("exec", Color.Beige)

(This can of course be the entire editor contents if you want it to be.)

Those pieces control the appearance of runs of text, and is separate from the actual control's background rendering (which is done via the renderer I mentioned).  If you are asking how to change the fore/background of specific runs of text, then yes, you'd do it via the styles in the XML or in code.

Actually, I just want to set the background color of the entire syntax editor window. Is there anyway to do that, who would set the background color of just the text but not the background color of the window itself, ie, the entire background whether there is text or not, surely this is possible, otherwise styles would be limited to foreground only. I have never seen a syntax editor that wouldn't let you set the entire background color of the window?

Nevermind, I got it, didn't realize that first example was the answer, thank you ... !!

Uh oh, found an issue, you can set the color like this okay (for the entire window background)

var renderer = (VisualStudio2005SyntaxEditorRenderer)editor.RendererResolved;
renderer.TextAreaBackgroundFill = new ActiproSoftware.Drawing.SolidColorBackgroundFill(Color.Black);

but there is no way to get the background color back out again, ie, from the "renderer.TextAreaBackgroundFill" it's impossible or at least seems that way to get the current background color from the editor.  I've changed your style editor to set the background color just fine by adding another ColorButton ...

Hi Mike,

If you try-cast the background fill back to a SolidColorBackgroundFill then you can get the Color off that object.