Changing fonts and colors

By default, the Workbench uses the fonts and colors provided by the operating system. However, there are a number of ways that this behavior can be customized.

Fonts

The Workbench lets you directly configure the following fonts:

Banner Font: Used in PDE editors, welcome pages and in the title area of many wizards. For instance the New Project wizard uses this font for the top title.
Dialog Font: Used for widgets in dialogs.
Header Font: Used as a section heading. For instance the Welcome page for the Eclipse Platform uses this font for the top title.
Text Font: Used in text editors.
CVS Console Font: Used in the CVS console.
Ignored Resource Font: Used to display resources that are ignored from CVS.
Outgoing Change Font: Used to display outgoing changes in CVS.
Console Font (defaults to text font): Used by the debug console.
Detail Pane Text Font (defaults to text font): Used in the detail panes of debug views.
Memory View Table Font (defaults to text font): Used in the table of the memory view.
Java Editor Text Font (defaults to text font): Used by Java editors.
Properties File Editor Text Font (defaults to text font): Used by Properties File editors.
Compare Text Font (defaults to text font): Used by textual compare/merge tools.
Java Compare Text Font (defaults to text font): Used by Java compare/merge tools.
Java Properties File Compare Text Font (defaults to properties file editor text font ): Used by Java properties file compare/merge tools.
Part Title Font (defaults to properties file editor text font ): Used for view and editor titles. Note: It is recommended that this font not be bold or italic because the workbench will use bold and italic versions of this font to display progress.
View Message Font (defaults to properties file editor text font ): Used for messages in the view title bar (if present).

To change these fonts:

Open the General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts preference page.
Select the font you want to change.
Click Change.
Use the dialog which opens to select a font.
Click OK.

Note: You can also click Use System Font to set the font to a reasonable value chosen by the operating system. For example, on Windows this will use the font selected in the Display Properties control panel.

Plug-ins that use other fonts may also provide preference entries to allow them to be customized. For example, the Java development tools provide a setting for controlling the font used by the Java editor (see Java > Java Editor Text Font on the preferences page).

In addition to the above, some text is always displayed in the system font. For example, the navigator tree always does this. To change the font used in these areas, you can use the configuration tools provided by the operating system (for example, the Display Properties control panel on Windows, or the .Xdefaults file in Motif).

Colors

To set the colors used by the Workbench to display error text and hyperlink text:

Open the General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts preference page.
Select the color you want to change in the tree view and click the color bar on the right.
Use the dialog which opens to select a color.
Click OK.

Plug-ins that use other colors may also provide preference entries to allow them to be customized. For example, the searching support provides a preference for controlling the color used to display potential matches (see the Foreground color for potential matches item on the General > Search preference page).

In general, the Workbench uses the colors that are chosen by the operating system. To change these colors you can use the configuration tools provided by the system (for example, the Display Properties control panel on Windows, or the .Xdefaults file in Motif).