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For any color set in the preferences, you should be able to set system defined colors, e.g. Window background, 3D Objects (Button Face), etc. This has (at least) two benefits: 1) It makes it easier to set colors. Currently, to set a system color you have to go to display preferences, look up the RGB values for the UI element you want to match, then type the values into the color dialog. 2) If you run the same workspace from multiple machines with different color settings, the colors will look wrong on all but the machine the colors were set on. In some cases, the mishmash can be distracting; in the worst case, it makes UI elements difficult or impossible to read.
This dialog is provided by the platform, IIRC. Moving to SWT for comment.
Yes, the color dialog is provided by the platform (at least on Windows). However, I don't think it necessarily has to go away to satisfy this request. You just need some way to pick a system color or use the existing dialog to pick a arbitrary color. Right now, we have a less than optimal solution where in some places system colors are the defaults and you can only select them using a Reset button (Workbench > Colors and Fonts) and other places where the only way to use a system color is to hardwire the RGB (e.g. setting the code assist tooltip color to window background).
BTW, it would seem that this would fit nicely with the 3.1 themes of "simple to use" and "rich client platform" and the plan item described in Bug 71124.
The preferences page could pop up a dialog that has some pre-defined colours and then give the user the option to define their own colours. Only when the user tries to define their own colour would you need to open the system colour dialog. I believe this is what ron is asking for. Moving back to the UI team since I don't think this is an SWT problem.
Changed the summary to one that makes a bit more sense.
Veronika: seems to me like he's asking for the ability to pick and choose from colours that are mapped to Windows UI elements. We could create a custom dialog that had some pre-defined elements in place, but we have no way of determining the values of system colours outside those that map to SWT.COLOR constants. *volly back*
Go ahead and make the dialog for the color constants if you want. Colors outside of these constants (such as "Window background, 3D Objects (Button Face") are Windows specific and won't be in the dialog. For the constants that SWT provides, you can determine the RGB values for the system color using getRGB(). Not sure why you would need to do this?
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 54039 ***
