As we all know, colors are very subjective. I'm sure no two of us are using all the same colors, unless there are two of us who have not changed the defaults. (Very unlikely, I think). It is therefore impossible that we all would agree on a set of default colors for ZTree.

So I hesitate to post this suggestion, except that there have been several negative comments about the Magenta color, (including comments offline from Kim and Ben Kent).

The change to the defaults came about after I commented to Kim that the default of bright green for the executables was not good, because that was the same color as the default BSG file color.

For reference, here was the default before the recent changes were made:

COM EXE BAT BTM:Bri Green
DLL DRV SYS:Green
C H CPP HPP MAK DEF:Bri CYAN
TXT DAT HLP ASC LOG LIS DES INF:Bri Whi
ZIP ARJ J RAR LZH:Whi
;INI CFG:Bri Blu
;DOC WQ1:Bri Mag
~*: bro

I didn't want to suggest too many changes, just enough to fix the problem. In the process, we also added a number of file extensions, and consolidated a few. So here is the current default:

COM EXE BAT BTM CMD VBS VBE JS JSE WSH WSF:Bri Mag
DLL DRV SYS:Green
C H CPP HPP MAK DEF:Bri Cyan
TXT DAT HLP ASC LOG LIS DES DOC WRI WQ1:Bri Whi
ZIP ARJ J RAR LZH:Whi
INI INF CFG:Bro
~* $* tmp bak:Bri Red

As you can see, only two colors were changed, (disregarding the added and consolidated extensions, and the previously commented-out entries).

Kim didn't much like the magenta, but my experience in using it for a few file types was that it grows on you. After some time he says he has also gotten used to it. However, after installing the Release Candidate, I see the problem! There is simply *too much* magenta! It's OK for a few files, (I use it for the INI, INF and CFG files), but it is a bit overwhelming for all the executables.

The simple solution, hopefully without getting into a big controversy, would be to swap the executable and source program colors. I say this realizing that for Kim, bright cyan for his C program code is best.

However, I feel that for non-programmer users, using bright cyan for the executables would be better. Programmers will want to change the program extension line anyway, depending on the programming language used, and they will have little problem in understanding how to do this.

Because the default for most users would then look better, my vote would be to swap the "Bri Mag" and "Bri Cyan" colors.

The other color that was changed was the temp files, (and now also backup), from brown to bright red. The choice of whether these files should be a bright or more subdued color depends largely on how you operate. If you like to just ignore these files, then you'll want a subdued color. If, like me, you want to get rid of them as soon as possible, then you want them bright, so they get your attention. Since ZTree is a file management tool, I think it's best, by default, to bring these to the user's attention. Users can easily change the color to something more subdued if they prefer.

- John