Display Options

This command brings up the Display page of the Preferences dialog box. These options are part of the current configuration.

 

Display Elements

The Display Elements group is used to turn on and off elements of the user interface.

Main Tool Bar

Displays the main toolbar at the top of the Source Insight application window.

Search Bar

Displays the File Search bar that appears below the main toolbar.

Status Bar

Displays the status bar at the bottom of the Source Insight application window.

Popup Toolbar

This enables the popup toolbar that appears when you whole-word select a symbol name. The popup tool­bar fades into view and lets you quickly jump to a symbol’s definition, a function’s caller, or find references to a symbol. The popup toolbar is first shown translucent, but it gets more opaque as you move the mouse closer to it.

Overviews (based on file type)

This globally enables the use of Overview scrollers in all source windows. See: The Overview Scroller.

When enabled, each file type determines if the Overview scroller is used in that type of file. See: File Type Options.

To disable the use of Overview scrollers in all source windows, disable this option.

Tab Tray

Turns on and off the tab tray at the bottom of the Source Insight application window. Floating windows that are minimized appear in the Tab Tray.

Reset

Resets the positions of all the auxiliary windows so that they are moved onto the main monitor, and are not transparent.

Options Group

The items in the Options Group control general options for different display elements in the program.

Page Number in status bar

If enabled, then the current page number that contains the current selection is also displayed in the status bar. The page number is calculated from the size the printer font selected in the File Type Options command, plus syntax formatting options, and the settings made in Page Setup.

Show exact case of file names

If enabled, then Source Insight displays file names using the exact upper and lower case of the name as it appears in the file system. If not enabled, then Source Insight will format the file name to look a little nicer by converting it to lower case and capitalizing the first letter. Source Insight does not alter the file name if it already contains a mixture of upper and lower case letters.

This option only affects how Source Insight displays file names. The file names are stored internally and in the database exactly as the file system reports them.

Show read-only file names with ! mark

If enabled, then Source Insight displays read-only file names in window titles with an exclamation point (!) at the beginning of the file name. This only affects how the file name is displayed in window titles.

Show current project name in application background

If enabled, then the name of the current project is drawn in the multiple document background area of the Source Insight application window.

Tile source and destination windows for Source Link commands

If enabled, then Source Insight tiles two windows to show the source and destination source links whenever you use one of the source link commands, such as Go To First Link, or Go To Next Link. The source link com­mands are also used when you run a custom command that parses output for source links (such as a "com­pile" command). If not enabled, then Source Insight will not alter the window arrangement when you used the source link commands, but it will active the window containing the target of the source link.

Source Insight does not perform tiling if the current window is maximized.

Enable Animations

Enables simple animations to show when input focus changes to a floating tool window, and when floating windows are "rolled up" or "rolled down". You might want to turn off animations if your video card perfor­mance is slow.

Trim long path names with ellipses

Long file path names are shortened and ellipses are inserted. This affects areas such as the title bar of win­dows.

Panels Group

These options affect floating and docked panel windows. See: Panel Windows.

Toolbar position in panels (Top or Bottom)

Each panel has a toolbar. You can select whether it is displayed at the top or bottom of the panel.

Enable transparent panels

If enabled, then floating panel windows will contain a transparency button in the title bar area of the window so that you can adjust the panel’s transparency.

Other Buttons

Styles…

Edits style properties. See: Style Properties.

Spacing...

Click this button to change character spacing options. See: Character Spacing Options. 

Window Tabs...

Click this button to edit the window tab options.

Scroll Bars...

Click this button to edit the vertical scroll bar options. See Scroll Bar Options.

Character Spacing Options

Character spacing options are used to control the horizontal and vertical spacing of characters. This dialog box lets you adjust how Source Insight computes the width of spaces, tabs, and common delimiters. The first two settings have no effect unless Line up white space is enabled in the File Type Options dialog box.

 

Horizontal Spacing Options

Horizontal spacing options affect the width of characters drawn when a proportionally spaced (variable-pitch) font is used and the Line up white space option is enabled in the File Type Options dialog box. If enabled, Source Insight will attempt to use a fixed width for spaces and tabs so that spaces and tabs line up the same way they do with a fixed pitch font. Programs generally look better with this turned on if you are using a proportional font.

The Space-Width Character

The space width character controls how wide a single space is, and therefore the displayed width of tab char­acters (tabs are some number of spaces wide). Source Insight computes a space to be same width as this character in whatever font is used for displaying. For example, the character "1" specified in this dialog box means that a space character will have the same width as the character "1". (Do not confuse the character with its numeric value 1. Source Insight does not interpret the character's numeric value.)

Source Insight computes the width based on the space width character so that spaces will scale correctly, independent of the font and the font size used.

In a mono-spaced font, such as Courier New, or Consolas, all characters are the same width, including spaces. However in a proportional font, such as Calibri, a space character is typically narrow, and many char­acters may be wider than the space character in the font. This option gives you control over how wide a space character is displayed, and therefore how wide tabs are.

Working with Wide Fonts

You may want to change this setting if you are working with a font that has unusual character widths, or if you just want to expand or contract your white space and indentation amounts. A narrower character will shrink the white space, and a wider character will expand it. This width is independent of the tab width set­ting specified in the File Type Options dialog box because the tab width is specified as a number of fixed-width character columns.

The common delimiter character controls the width of delimiters in a way similar to spaces. The delimiters affected are - | \ / and ! which are typically narrow characters in most fonts.

Layout tabstops using monospaced calculations

This option controls how tab widths are displayed. If enabled, then the width of a given tab will calculated assuming that you were using a monospaced font. This will generally make tabbed columns of text line up, even if you are using a variable pitched font for displaying your source code.

Layout spaces using monospaced calculations

This aligns space characters to appear how they would if a monospaced font is used. For example, 4 spaces in a row would appear the same width as a tab stop (if the tab width was 4 spaces). Source Insight looks at each line and tries to determine simply when to apply this rule to a space character. If it looks like you meant to line up columns manually using spaces, then it applies this rule. It only applies the rule for 2 or more consec­utive spaces. Otherwise, it calculates a space width to be the natural width of a space in the given font. This option is on by default.

Using this option, space size is natural, unless it looks like you meant to line up columns by using tabs and spaces. This is not an exact science!  

Source Insight should be doing a good job of showing you how text lines up in a simple display, even if you are using Syntax Formatting. You can also use the View  > Mono Font View command to switch to a simple monospaced font view and see the text alignment.

Vertical Spacing Options

These options control vertical line spacing.

Smaller Line Heights

Check this box to compress the line heights in order to show more lines of text on the screen. This is accom­plished by reducing the amount of "leading" added to the font by the operating system. Font leading is added to make vertical line spacing look pleasing in printed documents. However, it is not really necessary for editing source code.

Why All The Fuss About Spacing?

You may be wondering, "Why go to all this trouble? Can't you make a tab stop be ½ inch or whatever?" The answer is a little complicated. The problem is, unlike a word processor, Source Insight is trying to maintain a text file that other people may want to look at in a different editor or viewed in a fixed-pitch font.

A word processing program attempts to show text the way it would be printed on a physical printer. Source Insight is trying to show you how the text would look if you were looking at it in another editor in a fixed pitch font.

In a word processing program, text dimensions are measured in physical units, like inches or centimeters. It makes sense to have a tab stop at say, ½ inch. When the text is printed, the word processor makes sure the tab stop looks ½ inch wide on the printer too.

In Source Insight, tab stops are measured in fixed-size character columns. Source Insight tries to line up tabbed columns the same way it does with a fixed-pitch font.

If Source Insight just did the simple thing of moving to the next tab position, based on the horizontal pixel position, then when you look at the code with a simple fixed-pitch font, there may a different number of tabs than it appears on the screen.

Here is an example. Let's say somebody wrote this in Notepad, using Courier New (a fixed-pitch font), with tabs between columns so that X and Y, and Q and R line up. Both the words "narrow" and "very-wide" fit within column 0 - one tab stop, as shown below.

Now, in Source Insight, with rich formatting, "narrow" fits within a tab width, but "wide" doesn't. If Source Insight just pushed Y over by one more tab stop, this is what you get:

Now Y is aligned with Q. The rest of the columns don't line up anymore. In fact, this is exactly what happens if you turn off Line up white space in File Type Options.

When Line up white space is enabled, Source Insight tries to help the situation by lining up tab positions like this:

If your code looks like it does above, then you may want to specify a different space width character, such as "M" or "W", which are wider letters in most fonts. This would have an effect like this, where all tab stops would be wider:

This also works the other way when the text looks a lot narrower than it would be in a fixed pitch font.