Modifying Chromacoding

The IDL Editor and the Command Line view support chromacoding, which means that different types of IDL statements appear in different colors. To change the default colors used for different types of IDL statements, select Window → Preferences. In the Preferences dialog, select IDL and then select Syntax Coloring. All the options you can change appear in the Syntax Coloring page, shown below:

syntax_coloring_prefs.gif

Figure 5-2: Syntax Coloring

You can select the element you want to change and then click on Color to select a different color. To preview your selections, click Apply.

You can also choose to display background colors for any element. (The default for all elements is white.) Just click on the element, uncheck the Use editor background color check box, then click Background color to select a background. When your changes are complete, click OK.

By default, the Windows IDL Editor uses chromacoding. To turn off chromacoding in the Editor, set all the text settings to black.

Turning Chromacoding Off for the Command Line

To turn off chromacoding in the Command Line, use the following steps:

  1. Select Window → Preferences.
  2. In the Preferences dialog, click on the + next to IDL to expand the list of pages, then select Command Line.
  3. In the Command Line page, uncheck the Enable colored syntax check box.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The IDL Workbench supports keyboard shortcuts, called key bindings in IDL. The list of keyboard shortcuts is displayed by using the keystrokes Ctrl+Shift+L. You can customize the keyboard shortcuts by entering Ctrl+Shift+L again to open the keys preferences page. See Keys for information on customizing keyboard shortcuts.

Character Encodings Used by the IDL Workbench

Character Encoding governs which specific bytes are used to represent individual characters stored in a file. There are many different character encodings in common use; usage varies depending on location (different encodings may be used to represent different character sets, such as Latin or Cyrillic), computer platform, or age of the computer or software used to write files.

The IDL Workbench uses the UTF-8 character encoding by default. UTF-8 is a modern encoding designed to allow the representation of many different types of characters, and is widely supported by operating systems and applications. The fact that the IDL Workbench uses the UTF-8 encoding as its default means that if you open a file written using a different encoding, some characters may not appear correctly.

To change the default character encoding used by the IDL Workbench:

  1. Select Window → Preferences.
  2. In the Preferences dialog, click the + next to General to expand the list of pages, then select Workspace.
  3. In the Text file encoding section, select a new encoding from the Other dropdown list.

To change the character encoding used for a single file:

  1. Ensure that the file is included in an IDL Workbench project.
  2. Select the file name in the Project Explorer view.
  3. Select File → Properties.
  4. In the Text file encoding section, select a new encoding from the Other dropdown list.

If a file does not appear correctly when using the UTF-8 encoding and you do not know which encoding was used to create the file, you may need to try several other encodings before finding a match. The ISO-8859-1 encoding is perhaps the most common non-UTF encoding; if the file was created on a Windows system, you can also try the Windows-1252 encoding.