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#288 Cannot change background color in Main and Interaction Panes
After being asked and updating to the latest version of DrJava, I can no longer change the background color in my main and interactions pane. When I go to Preference->Display Options->Colors and change Background Color, only the panel showing currently open files changes color. I was working with a black background which I found to be easier on the eyes and if I could get this back, I would really appreciate it. Thank you for your help.
After playing around with the Display Options in Preferences, this lack of background color change appears only to be a problem with the javax.swing.plaf.nimbusLookAndFeel. All the other "Look and Feel" settings displayed the background color correctly.
Bravo jdlawrence. I wish I had checked the Sourceforge site for updates on your bug report before staring my own debugging foray on this issue. I traced the problem to the Nimbus L&F after running the prior beta release (in a context that apparently avoided reading my usual .drjava profile) and seeing the bug go away. Then I did a binary search on the commits since the beta (whiich ran versions that set the Default Look and Feel to Nimbus), so I erroneously traced the bug back to the first commit after the beta. But when I ran the beta again, it too had the background bug. The only difference was the the beta was now running the Nimbus look and feel.
I changed the default L&F to Nimbus because I liked the look and it worked well for me given that I never change the default background colors. But the Nimbus L&F has some serious bugs (given that Swing apps have been developed based on the semantics of older L&F's, which generally are consistent with each other. I like the Nimbus look welll enough that I may keep Nimbus as the default, depending on the user feedback that I receive. It is not clear that the nimbus developers accept the fact that Nimbus has serious bugs.
Since this bug is embedded in the Nimbus LookAndFeel library, we cannot fix it. if we can find a LookAndFeel that we like as well as Nimbus, we will demote Nimbus from its current status as the default LookAndFeel on Windows and Linux platforms. WARNING: if you change the default Background color and you run DrJava on non-Mac platforms, you should select a different LookAndFeel in the DrJava preferences.