Diff colors aren't themed

[mrtorrent]

The colors for diffs aren't themed, so text is hard or impossible to read in diff lines.

[jerclarke]

I think this definitely is a hole in the current NetBeans themes. I'm really digging the solarized theme overall, but the diff's there right now are painful to look at. It seems like there just isn't support for this in the core Solarized concept. There are only two background themes that work for any given context, and in Diff that isn't even close to being sufficient.

One solution I tried was using the inverse 'background tones', so that in dark theme diff's use the two shades of beige for added/changed lines. This is pretty hard to look at though, and fails to convey the very useful red/blue/green relationships we're used to from pleasant diff engines. It seems weird to me but I can't find anyone anywhere talking about this issue with the Solarized concept. Maybe because most users aren't running apps with build-in difference engines like NetBeans? There's discussion of the .diff filetype (which uses the normal green for new text), but that's different from this, because in NetBeans the diff engine still has coloring, so if we use green as the background then any text with the green color as it's text color will be invisible :S

I'm going to work on dementing the standard 'background tones' to be red/green/blue and see if I can come up with something at least workable. IMHO this netbeans plugin would be better off with functional diff colors than with strict adherence to the spec.

[jerclarke]

Here's a screenshot of some at least workable colors I came up with:

http://simianuprising.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/solarized-netbeans-diff-example2.png

In NetBeans-labels these are the values:

Color of Added Text: 41,69,24
Color of Removed Text: 89,37,37
Color of Changed Text: 29,58,96

They don't feel particularly good for the light theme but for the dark theme they are infinitely better than the defaults.

I'm not sure what's up with the grey background on the left hand side of the screenshot. I can't find what's controlling that color. Photoshop tells me it's 81,81,81, but I can't find anything in the NetBeans color prefs that is 81, 81, 81. That grey color stays even when I switch to the light solarized theme.

[fentie]

I just updated the settings for .diff files, I'll have a look at the side by side diff a bit later, hopefully within the next few days. I admit, it's a tricky issue.