When you first start RAD Studio XE8, you should notice some immediate visual differences:

• There is a new font used in most windows (menus, Object Inspector, Tool Palette, etc)
• The new font is also larger in many places (look in the Object Inspector in the screenshot below)
• The Main Menu and Toolbar area now has a blue background.

No prizes for guessing that this provoked a strong reaction amongst the beta testers. Some liked the blue, some hated it, Some liked the font, some hated it. Some liked that it was bigger, some hated it. Everyone had an opinion, but about the only thing we didn’t have was a consensus.

As a result, the obvious question was: “How do I change it?”

Thankfully it’s pretty easy.

Open up RegEdit and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\16.0. Then, create a new key called ModernTheme. Within that you can create one or more of the following values, depending on what you want to change:

Name              Type        Contents

FontName          String      The name of the Windows font
FontSize          DWord       Size of the Font as an Integer
MainToolBarColor  String      Color name or hex value of color

The first two are probably obvious, but the last might need explaining. Basically whatever you put in here will be passed to StringToColor. As such, it can either be a color name (ie. clNavy, clBtnFace, etc) or it can be a hex value like $00EA8FF1

The settings in the Regedit screenshot above result in the following in the IDE.

Pretty, I know.

I actually like the new font, however I find the font size too large for everyday use (for presentations though it’s great, makes some of the windows much more readable). I’m not a big fan of the blue toolbar though, I find it pulls my eyes away from the code, so I have my settings currently set to:

FontSize          DWord       9
MainToolBarColor  String      clBackground

Note I have no entry for FontName, so I pickup the default Font. This results in an IDE like:

So, if you’re coming to any of the launch events, now you don’t need to start the argument about liking/not liking the defaults. Just change them and argue about something more interesting.