With the new RAD Studio XE8, Embarcadero thought that Delphi looked too modern and the old CDE/Motif Java Swing style would look much more appropriate. XE8 also increased the font size of the main form including the menu bar, structure pane, object inspector, project manager, tool palette, call stack, …
Thanks to Daniel Wolf’s German blog post, I was able to restore the XE7 style. Unfortunately there is no simple configuration dialog in the IDE, so you have to make some changes to the registry by hand or download Daniel’s “wuppdi·StylerXE8” tool.
- Quit XE8
- Create a new file XE7StyleForXE8.reg file and paste the following content into it
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\16.0\ModernTheme] "FontName"="Segoe UI" "FontSize"=dword:00000009 "MainToolBarColor"="clBtnFace"
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Save the file and double click it so that the registry changes are applied to XE8.
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Start XE8
The IDE uses the following default values if the “ModernTheme” registry key doesn’t exist.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\16.0\ModernTheme] "FontName"="Segoe UI" "FontSize"=dword:0000000a "MainToolBarColor"="clGradientActiveCaption"
This is also described in the DocWiki.
Before:
After:
You can also put in other fonts that work great – like Source Code Pro – which REALLY shines, both in the IDE and the editor.
It doesn’t take too much to work out why – the developers are getting older and need a larger font so that they can see the menu.
Interesting how Embarcadero was not able to add an option to customize this settings since many beta testers complained about color and font size. Now we have to edit registry for that, well done…
You can also use the wuppdi·StylerXE8 provided by Daniel in his blog ( link above)
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