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 three 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.

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.

To change these fonts:

  1. On the main menu bar, click Window > Preferences.
  2. Expand the Workbench category and select Colors and Fonts.
  3. Select the font you want to change.
  4. Click Change.
  5. Use the dialog which opens to select a font.
  6. 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 (Java > Editor > Appearance > Text font).

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:

  1. On the main menu bar, click Window > Preferences.
  2. Expand the Workbench category and select Colors and Fonts.
  3. Select the color you want to change in the tree view and click the color bar on the right.
  4. Use the dialog which opens to select a color.
  5. 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 setting for controlling the color used to display inexact matches (Workbench > Search > Foreground color for inexact matches).

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 (eg. the Display Properties control panel on Windows, or the .Xdefaults file in Motif).

Related concepts
Fonts and Colors in Eclipse