Now I can easily distinguish the active vs. inactive panes!

[Scott_Y]

This is neither a complaint about FC XE nor a wish for Marek to implement -- unless he thinks it's worthwhile, of course :^) Instead, I'm just passing along something which has become a surprising help to me.

Despite a bright orange-to-red blend in the active address bar, I sometimes didn't immediately recognize which pane was active and which was inactive. But that difficulty essentially disappeared after I colored the background of the inactive pane a light grey via the settings for View > File/Folder list > Color/Font tab. The values are

Hue: 30
Sat: 30
Lum: 225
Red: 241
Green: 240
Blue: 237

This complements the default background colors already set for Quick Filter Active, Plain View Active, and Only Selected Active.

While I'm at it, I want to thank Marek for adding this very useful set of controls to FC XE. In 2009x, a background color could be set only for Flat View Active (now called Plain View). The colored backgrounds provide clear and immediate visual feedback when any of the conditions are active.

[joby_toss]

I also dim the inactive panel.
Would be nice to make it a checkbox option.

[BGM]

I too, dim the inactive panel - I change it to the color of a "control" background - that is, the same color as the splitter bar. This makes it real obvious to me which panel is active.

I also found that if you make the active tab's font to be bold, that it causes the size of the tab to change all the time, which is very annoying, and it also causes some confusion to FC if I quickly double-click the last tab to close it - so I don't use bold anymore, although I would prefer to.

[Scott_Y]

I too, dim the inactive panel - I change it to the color of a "control" background - that is, the same color as the splitter bar. This makes it real obvious to me which panel is active.

Yes, that's an even more obvious a signal, and easier to set because you just select a pre-set color rather than editing the individual values.

[Scott_Y]

Slight improvements to make the active vs. inactive pane more contrastive for me:

1. Made the inactive pane background the same color as the scroll bar and inactive border (thanks for motivating that, BGM :^)
2. Made the "focused item inactive list" the same color as the inactive background.

Now the active pane stands out by virtue of the white background, colored focused item, and colored address bar. The inactive pane is entirely grey, except for color in the active tab.

[BGM]

What I have done for the active panel, is, since I set the active address bar to a pale yellow, I make the active tab gradiate from pale-yellow on the bottom to deep orange on the top. That way it looks like the active tab is part of the address bar, which it is in a way. On the active tab, you can set its "hightlight", which is a horizontal color bar at the top of the tab - to red, and the text to black. This looks attractive and is obvious. The only part here that seems a little strange is that the active tab on the inactive panel seems to get the same colouring as the active tab in the active panel. Finally, I make all inactive tabs that same "control" colour, and make the text a dark gray. Now, at a glance, I know which tab I am in.

[BGM]

Marek, I see that in the "Customize Colors" part of the tabs options, there is no option to designate the colour of an inactive tab on mouseover. Also, the colour bar for inactive tabs on mouseover is called "Hottrack" and is in the list under Active tab colours instead of inactive tab colours. That is a bit confusing.

[AEN007]

19February2012

Greetings.
Glad I happened to notice this thread this morning.

I also often mistake which FrC pane is active ...
Maybe because the active tab in the inactive pane is colored
the same as the active tab in the active pane ...
Maybe it would be better FrC gave the option to color
the active tab in the inactive pane?
So it could/would be a different color
than the active tab in the active pane ...

I have FrC stripe the rows in the pane & highlight the sort column.
Maybe it would be better if FrC did NOT do those things in the inactive pane?

[ralfso]

You can set the inactive pane to another color (e.g. gray).

settings > file/folder list > color/font

[AEN007]

19February2012

Greetings.
I was already aware of that setting, and
the others posts in this thread make color coding suggestions.
All of the points I just posted remain ...

[Scott_Y]

I also often mistake which FrC pane is active ...
Maybe because the active tab in the inactive pane is colored
the same as the active tab in the active pane

I agree that this is a factor in attracting our attention to the inactive panel. Perhaps there could be a check-box option to color or not color the active tab in the inactive pane.

For me personally, however, the attraction has been significantly lessened by coloring the inactive pane's background the same grey as the splitter panel, which is also the default color for the inactive tabs. And the colored active tab in the inactive pane is helpful to see what tab I will get by switching panes. So perhaps a better solution would be a check-box option to simply "dim" the active tab of the inactive pane.

[AEN007]

I have FrC stripe the rows in the pane & highlight the sort column.
Maybe it would be better if FrC did NOT do those things in the inactive pane?

19February2012
I don't find coloring the inactive pane too effective
because the stripes & highlighted sort column still really stand out ...

[Scott_Y]

579 added an option under Folder Tabs > Tab Colors to "Use highlight only for active panel."
The highlight is the line across the top of the tab (default color = dark blue).

[AEN007]

21February2012
570 is (still) the latest version downloading.
I use the install-free / zip download ...

[uwee]

570 is the latest PUBLIC download version!

Access to the non public beta versions is restricted to donors http://www.freecommander.com/fc_donation_en.htm