Errors should be red in themes, for consistency and visibility

[processing-bot]

Created by: bitshapesoft

Description

First, having themes is great! I appreciate the work going into it. I humbly suggest a functional color choice:

Error bar colors, and squiggly underlines, should stay red (and warnings yellow) across the themes, or at least so in the default theme. As a teacher, it is hard to get students to notice errors while editing. Now, with the neutral gray color, even I am missing them when they appear. Red == error is a convention across just about every IDE, and I think it would be good to keep it that way.

Expected Behavior

When an error is detected during editing, the color of the error message background should be red.

Current Behavior

The error is a neutral dark gray color, which is easy to miss.

I understand that theme colors can be edited, but with a class of 60 students, the defaults make a big impact.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open editor with default theme.
2. Type a line of code with an error.
3. The squiggly underline and error message background are gray.

Your Environment

• Processing version: 4.0b5
• Operating System and OS version: macOS 12.1
• Other information:

Possible Causes / Solutions

Please make the error color a consistent red throughout the themes.

[processing-bot]

Created by: benfry

Thanks for sharing your thoughts; let me discuss with Paul who's been working on the themes. I can think of two solutions offhand, one is that we figure out a way to generate a red that always works with the theme, another is that we make it a preference that can be used in class settings like this. Totally understand the problem with wrangling a class, and we want to make sure it's working well in those situations.

[processing-bot]

Created by: scudly

As someone who is slightly red colorblind (as are around 8% of men), let me emphasize that pure red on a black background absolutely sucks to try to read. Similarly, on a bright background, I often won't notice the difference between black and red text. If you make errors red, please don't let them be pure red. Make them red-ish, but with some green and blue mixed in as well so that they are brighter than black.

I often have to highlight errors in the console, making them white over blue, to be able to read them. So other possibilities might include changing the background color, changing the font, underlining, or even drawing a full box around the errors.

[processing-bot]

Created by: benfry

@scudly Let's keep this to the point of the issue at hand. It was a request that errors stay red, but it sounds like you have a completely separate set of feedback around readability that's not related to the specific subject line. Please file a separate issue, or better yet, since yours is broader feedback—make a theme that addresses the problems you cite, and share it with the community so that it can be used by other people who share your concerns. There's more about how themes are implemented here: https://github.com/processing/processing4/wiki/Themes