Dark Intellipad

As you can see, the Intellipad editor that comes with the Oslo SDK can also be customized, including the color scheme used by the editor:

The experience right now, however, is… not the best. You have to jump through 2 different hoops:

• Edit the ClassificationFormats.xcml file that is found in the Intellipad\Settings directory of your Oslo SDK installation.
• Write code (in IronPython, fortunately) to change stuff like the background color for the entire editor window, like the sample in this post on the Intellipad Team’s blog.

I really like having the settings be just a file you can edit/link/version easily, compared to the mess that the Visual Studio settings system is right now. However, even these two together are not enough yet to provide a decent experience for Intellipad customization. In particular, it doesn’t solve a couple of things:

1. The entire editor background color should be changeable from ClassificationFormats.xcml as well. Having to do it through code is a bit annoying.
2. The sample in the blog post mentioned above only changes the background color for the current editor window, not for all open windows; which is a bit annoying.
3. There’s no way to adjust the selection color used by the editor, as far as I can see which is completely unacceptable when using a dark background color. At least the problem with the caret being always black seems to have been fixed in the latest SDK update.