Hello there,

I have stumbled upon yet another bit that I would like to inquire on in pd. I now wish to change the default canvas color in pd from the stark white to something a bit more relaxing on the eyes, for instance a grey or a blue. I have looked about with nary any luck on the subject all but for one small post on these forums.

The thread is located here: http://puredata.hurleur.com/sujet-6770-using-extended-gui-vanilla

The last post indicates that such a thing can be done on a linux system, however I am on windows. I have managed to find two 'tk' files like the ones specified in the post with which I can then open up a sort of console to use to debug(?) in pd.

I am just curious as to what could be done to change the default canvas color in pd much like you can change where it searches for libraries on startup, it would run through the code that tells it to be a white canvas and instead it would now be told to be grey.

Thank you all for any help that you can provide.

Cheers!

Alright, I'm getting back into the swing of things in pd, and of course it is working like a champ. However, these little things always manage to creep up on me, and I do with that I could fix them, or find more info on how to undertake solving them.

After taking a break from trying to tweak the pd gui and defaults and just using it as is, I have decided to return to my previously unfinished wishes and ideas. Looking back on this thread, the one posted as a link, and some general research I am able to open up the wish console, which I have gathered is the backend of pd. However, I cannot seem to interact with it in any way. No matter what my input is into the console after I press enter it just starts a new empty line with a >.

I will take another look a programming in the wish console to see if I can't make some sense of what's going on, but any help here would be much appreciated too! It seems like the gentleman who got his canvas color to change isn't active here on the forum anymore, which is a shame because he did have an answer.

EDIT: Looking over the old thread I see that those are commands that are being put into the wish console. I am able to type those in, however, after the first set of commands I get an error: wrong # of args. Should be "proc name args body"

If I try to type in the two lines of code together as written in the mentioned post I instead get, error: extra characters after close brace.

If I ignore the error given from the first line and proceed to type in the second, I get no error. But, as I expected, nothing happens.

I am unsure as to what to do, or what can be experimented upon. I certainly wish I knew of some better resources to learn about the more technical and backend side of pd.

Thank you!

The wish console is actually for running Tcl/Tk scripts, which is what Pd uses for its gui. What that previous thread was suggesting was to actually edit the .tcl file which contains the scripts.

However, as of 0.43, you can send Tcl/Tk commands directly to Pd from Pd's console window. It's the field at the bottom. The background is saved in a variable called "canvas_fill", so you can use the Tcl field to change that value like this:

set canvas_fill "grey"

You can, of course, change "grey" to whatever color Tk likes; just Google around for what's allowed.

If you want to hard code it, look for the file called pd-gui.tcl (not sure where it is in Windows), open it in a text editor, and change the color on line 228.

there's also this library http://puredata.info/downloads/hcs that has some gui manipulation things, but personally I've had some strange issues with saving colors using it

Thank you both so very much!

Here I am delving into this console business and the answer was right there at the bottom of pd every time I open it! You have no idea how wonderful of news this is to me, it will help so much with my productivity being able to have the background a better color for my visuals.

@Maelstorm said:

If you want to hard code it, look for the file called pd-gui.tcl (not sure where it is in Windows), open it in a text editor, and change the color on line 228.

Maelstorm, is this somewhere in the pd documentation? I cannot for the life of me ever remember finding something like this in going through the tutorials or reading online. Regardless, thank you both again!

@austin_ep said:

Maelstorm, is this somewhere in the pd documentation? I cannot for the life of me ever remember finding something like this in going through the tutorials or reading online.

I don't think so. In fact, you shouldn't edit pd-gui.tcl, now that I think about it. The preferred way now is to use GUI plugin scripts. I just looked up how to make them since I've never done it before, and for this one it's really easy. Just open a text editor and put this in it:

set ::canvas_fill "grey"

I'm not sure why you need the :: here and not in the Pd console, but you do. Save the file and name it something like "canvasgrey-plugin.tcl". You can replace "canvasgrey" with whatever you want, just make sure it ends with "-plugin.tcl" or it won't get noticed by Pd. Then, you just put it in the same place you would put new externals. See my tutorial on that if you aren't sure how:

http://puredata.hurleur.com/sujet-8112-install-externals-libraries-gui-plug-ins-etc

Pd will load the script on start-up, and now you don't have to go around editing it's default files and worry about screwing them up.

There's documentation for GUI plugins here:

http://puredata.info/docs/guiplugins/?searchterm=gui%20plugins

seems like you can also use any html color in hex
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colors.asp
http://puredata.info/docs/guiplugins/GuiPluginsAPI/