Dynamically changing the theme

Ah nevermind, I figure out what was going one. I had left a line of code in that was assigning an empty HighlightingStyleRegistry to the SyntaxEditor.

My question still stands about copying the highlighting types and styles from the AmbientHighlightingStyleRegistry instance. Do we need to do that?

I am finding that copying the types and styles is giving inconsistent results where the forecolors are not what I would expect for my custom languages. I suspect it is because the ambient registry has styles from the C# language definition that are overlapping. If that is the case, then I will have to come up with some way to manually register types/styles.

Hi Marc,

Importing a .vssettings file will only overwrite the existing style entries in a particular IHighlightingStyleRegistry.  When the SyntaxEditor.HighlightingStyleRegistry property is null, that SyntaxEditor will use the AmbientHighlightingStyleRegistry.Instance's IHighlightingStyleRegistry. 

If you are wanting to use a secondary custom IHighlightingStyleRegistry, and want to properly import a .vssettings file into it, you would need to follow these steps:

1. Create the HighlightingStyleRegistry instance.
2. Ensure the HighlightingStyleRegistry has an IClassificationType registered for EVERY classification type that can possibly be used by your app, whether it comes from DisplayItemClassificationTypeProvider or ANY of your syntax languages you support.  You could manually register a simple empty Style for each of these classification types since your import will override them.  Or if you already did thise for the AmbientHighlightingStyleRegistry.Instance, you could enumerate the registrations there and copy them over.  The main thing is to make sure you have an entry for every possible classification type.
3. Make sure you .vssettings file has an entry for EVERY classification type that is registered in the previous step.
4. Import the .vssettings file into the registry, and it should now update the IHighlightingStyle for each IClassificationType that has been registered.
5. Set the SyntaxEditor.HighlightingStyle property to your HighlightingStyleRegistry instance.  You can reuse the instance among multiple SyntaxEditor instances if you wish.

On a side note, the DisplayItemClassificationTypeProvider constructor lets you specify an alternate IHighightingStyleRegistry.  So you can use this code to initialize those classification types (with default light theme colors) in a registry:

new DisplayItemClassificationTypeProvider(registry).RegisterAll();

I hope that helps!

Hi, that did help. Thanks for the detailed explanation. I did get it going but there seems to be a quirk in my implementation. The caret indicator remains dark when applying the dark theme when used in complex UI controls. I will send an email to ActiPro support with a simplified sample project that shows what the problem is.

I also found a easy solution to pre-populate ClassificationType's and HighlightingStyle's if you are using a custom Language that was made using the Language editor:

var registry = new HighlightingStyleRegistry();
new MyClassificationTypeProvider(registry).RegisterAll();
new DisplayItemClassificationTypeProvider(registry).RegisterAll();
using (var stream = new MemoryStream(Properties.Resources.MyDarkTheme))
    registry.ImportHighlightingStyles(stream);

Hi Marc,

Yes that code snippet will work great.

Thanks for the sample regarding the caret issue.  We found the bug and fixed it for v21.1.  In the meantime, you can work around it with this code in your SyntaxEditorEx class, which will clear the caret color cache:

protected override void OnVisibleChanged(EventArgs e) {
    base.OnVisibleChanged(e);
    this.IsOverwriteModeActive = true;
    this.IsOverwriteModeActive = false;
}

Or as you saw in your related ticket reply, you can use the new SyntaxEditor.UseInvertedCaret property instead of manually changing the caret color.