How to set color for highlighted files in destination pane?

Say I click on File1 in the upper pane. That pane becomes the source pane and File1 gets highlighted using the colors I chose under "Preferences, Display, Colors & Fonts, Files, Selected text/background". Then say I click on File2 in the lower pane. The lower pane now becomes the source pane and File2 takes on the colors mentioned above. So the upper pane is now the destination pane and File1 changes color to black characters with a gray background. But I didn't choose those particular colors and I don't see where I can do that. In fact, why is this file highlighted at all? I don't see the point since none of the commands seem to act on this file. This highlighting comes at a very high cost to me since every now an then I delete the wrong file by thinking that this highlighted file in the destination pane is the "selected file" when in fact it is not. If I could change the colors of this destination pane highlighting (doesn't Dopus claim that all colors are settable?) then I would change it to match the other files around it so that it doesn't appear to be highlighted at all.

The colours used for source and destination selections should be the same, except that the destination selections (as well as selections in inactive windows) will be faded by default.

You can change the amount of fading under Preferences - Display - Options: Fade selected item colors when file display does not have focus.

If you set it to 100% then you won't see any selections at all in inactive file displays. (Which probably isn't a good idea as you wouldn't be able to tell what would happen if you clicked the Delete button on the toolbar of an inactive window.)

If you turn off fading then both source and destination selections will look the same. (But having them look different is useful since the faded selection colours are a good visual cue as to which set of files will be acted on when you click a toolbar button in an active window.)

Exception: If you are displaying a system/virtual folder, such as My Computer or Desktop, then the colours are defined by Explorer and not Opus. In the case of Desktop, go to /desktopdir instead of /desktop and you'll see things using Opus's colours. (/desktopdir is your personal Desktop directory -- a real directory -- while /desktop is the merged view of your personal Desktop directory with the All Users desktop directory and some other icons like Recycle Bin.)

[quote="leo"]You can change the amount of fading under Preferences - Display - Options: Fade selected item colors when file display does not have focus. If you set it to 100% then you won't see any selections at all in inactive file displays. (Which probably isn't a good idea as you wouldn't be able to tell what would happen if you clicked the Delete button on the toolbar of an inactive window.)
[/quote]

Thanks for pointing out that option, although it doesn't quite do what you think. The attached picture shows the effect I see with this control. (I should have used png instead of gif for more accurate colors, but my screen looks very close to this). In all four cases captured in this picture, the upper pane is the source pane and the lower is the destination pane. In the top figure, I set it to 99%. As you can see, the highlighting in the two panes looks virtually identical (which you thought would happen at 0%). At 0% (the bottom screen capture) the selected file in the destination pane is barely readable so this would not likely be a useable setting. No value for this parameter causes the destination highlighting to dissappear as you suggested it would (and how I would prefer).

By the way, you implied one could have a delete button in the destination pane? Is that so? How do you create such a thing? I only have delete buttons in the main toolbar and they only act on the source (i.e. selected) pane.

Thanks
~Paul


Sorry, I forgot it worked like that. Opus only fades out the background colour of selected files, leaving the text colour alone.

The logic behind that is that if you have inverted selection colours (as you do and I think as the default config does as well), then fading both the background and text colours towards their unselected colours would result in them ending up very similar to each other. (e.g. 50% fade between black and yellow, drawn on top of a 50% fade between yellow and black, would result in identical colours drawn on top of each other and a solid block of colour which can't be read.)

Perhaps for extreme opacity values the text colour should be faded as well, though. In your screenshots its clear that very low opacities don't have any useful result as you've got black on black (or dark blue). I'll play around with that idea with some different colours and suggest it to GPSoftware if it seems to work.

FWIW, in my own configuration the text colour is the same for normal and selected files -- only the background colour changes -- so low opacity values make selected files look like unselected files when in inactive windows. (Screenshot below.)

I was talking about the normal delete button, in the situation where you have a single-pane window that is a destination. In that situation, even though the file display is a destination, the delete button works on its files because the source file display is in a completely separate window.

That was the best advise. As you said, the default was to use reverse video for selected files, so I kept that tactic even though I changed the colors around quite a bit. But when I took your advise and just used the background color to distinguish selected files it works much better. Now with a 25% fade out I can just barely see which files are selected in the destination window, but it is not so obvious that I would think those are the files that would be deleted if I hit the delete button.

Personally I think Dopus should provide a way to change the background color based on the source/destination status. As you did, I made the title bars dramatically different for source and destination, however even this does not prevent me from occationally mixing them up. Perhaps this will be less of a problem now that I have adjusted the selected file color scheme.

Thanks very much for your help!

~Paul

I am using 12.33; can someone please tell me the setting to change color of highlight?

You may also want to change the File display borders for source and destination it's easier to tell which is the source and which is the destination.

Thanks, but changing these settings has no effect for me. None.

Whether (and how much, if not using visual styles) the selection fades when inactive is configured in Preferences / Display / Options.

It was the "visual styles override" causing the problem.