Is there a way to change highlight colors for found text?

[john1857]

Something I frequently do is search for a particular regex. With other editors the found text is usually highlighted clearly, but in Textpad it's highlighted in a pale gray while the Find dialog has focus, and I can't distinguish this from normal text. I have to click on the main window before it's highlighted in a visible way, and then click back to the find dialog if I want to continue searching. I can of course "mark all", but this has disadvantages (the lines are marked but the text might be off-screen if the line is long, so then I have to word-wrap; and if I already have lines marked, I have to cancel them if I want to step through just the lines that match what I'm searching for).

I have searched the settings, but I can't find anything as simple as setting the highlight color. Am I missing something, or is there really no way to do this?

[Mr. Code Monkey]

Thanks, john1857. I never noticed how annoying that was until now. Really, thanks a lot...

I second this feature request. There does not seem to be setting in either TextPad, nor windows for this. A spot check of other programs show they have much better contrast/colors for found-results display.

[MarJohn]

I might be the one missing something simple, but can't you use Configure, Preferences, Document Classes, Search, Colours - as shown here:

[bbadmin]

Change the background color of "Selected text (no focus)" for your document classes. The default color works in the dark theme, but it needs tweaking a bit with a white background. We'll change the default to this in the next release:

Screenshot 2025-05-07 071500.png (210.44 KiB) Viewed 1210 times

Note that you can close the Find dialog box after the first match, then use Ctrl+F to find subsequent matches, which will be highlighted in the background color of "Selected text".

[Mr. Code Monkey]

Thanks that worked. And I found Color settings not showing for applying it across all document classes.

[john1857]

Change the background color of "Selected text (no focus)" for your document classes. The default color works in the dark theme, but it needs tweaking a bit with a white background. We'll change the default to this in the next release:

Thanks. It seems I have to do it for each document class -- but I read in another post that you said " If you want to propagate its settings to all document classes, set that option before clicking OK."

I can't find a "propagate" option -- tried "Set defaults" but that just restores the defaults. What am I missing now?

Note that you can close the Find dialog box after the first match, then use Ctrl+F to find subsequent matches, which will be highlighted in the background color of "Selected text".

Yes, true. Thanks.

[Mr. Code Monkey]

I can't find a "propagate" option -- tried "Set defaults" but that just restores the defaults. What am I missing now?

Yeah, it's a bit counterintuitive. Find it here:
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apply to all setting.png (57.53 KiB) Viewed 676 times

[john1857]

Aha! Fine, all working now. Many thanks.