ViEmu Forums - the visual block's color is too light

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (Jon_Symnum) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:14:49 +0000

Thanks a lot for letting me know! Hopefully the VS2005 SP1 will fix this kind of things when it's ready.

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (Cactus) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:13:17 +0000

Found the culprit:

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for DB Professionals
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals Version 2.0.50727.206

After uninstalling this it works fine. I think the version installed was CTP5 or 6.

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (Jon_Symnum) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 11:13:28 +0000

Hm, I have SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition installed, which installs most of those plugins, and it still works fine. I'll research it in more detail and get back to you with what I come up with.

I'm getting a new computer in a few days which will allow me using VMs to reproduce installation scenarios, so hopefully that will help, too.

What sequence of installation steps did you follow? It could be of help.

Best regards,

Jon

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (Cactus) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 02:21:00 +0000

Just tested using my home computer, and the issue with the selection color is behaving correctly, so the issue must be with the configuration of my work computer.

My home computer has the same version of VS and ViEmu, but does not have DB Pro, Active Reports, or any of the SQL add-ins. Maybe the problem is connected to one of those? If I have time, I'll tinker with it tomorrow and see if I can pin it down.

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (localvar) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:39:23 +0000

I have the same version of vs2005 and viemu installed as Cactus. and I have installed a hotfix for VS, it is kb916769

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (Jon_Symnum) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 23:15:20 +0000

Regarding Edit.CommentSelection: starting with 2.0, ViEmu (by default) uses a custom text marker to represent the current visual range. This allows much more faithful emulation of vim's visual mode, but the selection you see is not an actual Visual Studio selection (it uses VS's range highlighting support). If you want to apply a VS command to a selection, you need to select the range with VS's selection. For this, ViEmu provides the 'gS' command, which turns the current visual range into the VS selection. So, the proper way to do with would be 'g', 'S', Ctrl-K, Ctrl-C.

There is an alternative method which relies in using VS's selection to display the current visual range. This is what the ViEmu setting "Use VS selection for Visual mode" does. If this setting is activated, visual range emulation will be a bit worse (VS selection doesn't allow the cursor anywhere but in the endpoints of the selected range, etc...), but the selection will directly be prepared for the Ctrl-K,Ctrl-C or other commands.

I have tested the selection color setting in both VS2005 with the custom text markers hotfix as installed by Resharper (Version 8.0.50727.51 (QFE.050727-5100)) and in plain vanilla VS2005 (Version 8.0.50727.42 (RTM.050727-4200)), and it works fine here. I know it's not much help, but I really think it's a bug in VS2005's custom text marker handling. The reason is that ViEmu doesn't have any code at all to provide that configurability - it just inserts some entries in the VS registry, and it exposes a very simple interface to provide the default colors (the same code implements that for all three custom text markers in ViEmu). I already know about several naive bugs in VS2005's handling of that (including the one fixed in the about hotfix, consisting in, as explained by MS, the fact that they had used a 5 bit bitfield to store custom text markers w/o checks for overflow, another one in which custom text markers don't appear in the configuration dialog when any single entry in that part of the registry is incorrect, the fact that an uninstall/reinstall loses the colors until one starts VS up twice, etc...) - this area is much more solid in VS.NET 2003.

I will try to ask my Microsoft contacts, but that is usually no guarantee of getting a viable solution.

The one thing I can think that could work would be to uninstall and reinstall ViEmu, and possibly some other add-in that you might have installed. This will cause the environment to rescan the registry and it may be of help.

I apologize for the clumsiness in handling this, unfortunately, there is not much I can do - there isn't even any code to debug in ViEmu with regards to this!

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (Cactus) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:49:08 +0000

JNG wrote:

If "Use Visual Studio Selection" is checked, the "ViEmu selection" color setting shouldn't have any effect (the "Selected Text" setting should).

I went back to double-check, to make sure I wasn't crazy. I see the same behavior -- that is, no background color change when using v or V to enter visual mode -- with either "use visual studio selection" checked or unchecked. I have the default color for both Item foreground and Item background for Plain Text, Selected Text and ViEmu Selection.

I also noticed another quirky behavior that I failed to mention earlier. After using v or V to select a block of text, then Edit.CommentSelection (either from the menu or the default key of Ctrl-K, Ctrl-C), it comments only the last line selected. Same for UncommentSelection.

I'm researching into the marker problem, it seems the hotfix is not generally available (alghough I saw that installing Resharper installs the hotfix, which they need because they add 30+ custom text markers). I'm not really sure this is the reason, but, do you have any other add-ins installed which might add new custom text markers?

I don't think so ... here is the complete list of what's installed. Pretty vanilla.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Version 8.0.50727.42 (RTM.050727-4200)
Microsoft .NET Framework
Version 2.0.50727

Installed Edition: Enterprise

Microsoft Visual Basic 2005
Microsoft Visual Basic 2005

Microsoft Visual C# 2005
Microsoft Visual C# 2005

Microsoft Visual J# 2005
Microsoft Visual J# 2005

Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office
Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005
Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for DB Professionals
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals Version 2.0.50727.206

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Developers
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers

Data Dynamics ActiveReports 2.0
ActiveReports Report Designer for Visual Studio .NET

NGEDIT Software's ViEmu v2.0.37
ViEmu 2.0 - vi/vim editor emulation for Microsoft(TM) Visual Studio(TM)
(c) 2005-2006 NGEDIT Software (www.ngedit.com)

SQL Server Analysis Services
Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services Designer
Version 9.00.2047.00

SQL Server Integration Services
Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services Designer
Version 9.00.2047.00

SQL Server Reporting Services
Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Designers
Version 9.00.2047.00

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (Jon_Symnum) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 18:12:32 +0000

If "Use Visual Studio Selection" is checked, the "ViEmu selection" color setting shouldn't have any effect (the "Selected Text" setting should).

I'm researching into the marker problem, it seems the hotfix is not generally available (alghough I saw that installing Resharper installs the hotfix, which they need because they add 30+ custom text markers). I'm not really sure this is the reason, but, do you have any other add-ins installed which might add new custom text markers?

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (Cactus) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:57:00 +0000

I have the same problem. No matter what color I select for ViEmu selection, the selected region appears white (same as background color). The behavior is actually the same whether "Use Visual Studio selection for visual mode" is checked or not.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Version 8.0.50727.42 (RTM.050727-4200)
Microsoft .NET Framework
Version 2.0.50727

NGEDIT Software's ViEmu v2.0.37
ViEmu 2.0 - vi/vim editor emulation for Microsoft(TM) Visual Studio(TM)
(c) 2005-2006 NGEDIT Software (www.ngedit.com)

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (Jon_Symnum) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:24:34 +0000

Hmm... what build of ViEmu and of Visual Studio are you using? I've just checked again and it works fine both in VS.NET 2003 and VS2005.

There was a bug with custom text marker in the release version of VS2005, which would mix up markers above a certain number. This could happen if you have other add-ins installed. There is a hotfix for that, let me know the exact version of VS (in Help|About) so that I can check whether it may be that.

Regards,

Jon

PS: I'm guessing the preference "Use Visual Studio selection for visual mode" is not checked!

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (localvar) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 03:08:48 +0000

I've tried this, but it seems useless for "ViEmu selection", while "ViEnu hlsearch" and "ViEmu Incremental Search" behave correctly.

Thanks

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (Jon_Symnum) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 02:08:02 +0000

I tried to find the default color closest to vim's selection (I use default gvim under Windows, it may be different in other environments).

But, in any case, you can head over to Tools|Options|Environment|Fonts and Colors and there, together with all VS configurable colors, you will find "ViEmu selection", "ViEmu hlsearch" and "ViEmu Incremental Search" to customize to your hearts content.

Best regards,

Jon

Re: the visual block's color is too light

dummy@example.com (localvar) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 01:54:25 +0000

in visual mode, if I select only a few letters, I can hardly see where the selection block is, especially with a LCD monitor.