MacOS – Xcode, change background color of selection

System preferences > General > Appearance > [Blue|Graphite]

Graphite will turn menu selection co lor to dark grey. Of course it's system wide so it also will change the color for other UI elements.

Modding

You will need :

• SArtFileTool
• image editor
• a good backup ;-)

Download SArtFileTool into ~/Downloads/SArtFile then copy and decompress the system art resource file :

cd ~/Downloads/SArtFile
cp /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreUI.framework/Resources/SArtFile.bin ./
./sartfiletool -d SArtFile.bin artfiles

Go into the artfiles directory and find 52.png 68.png 71.png files and modify them.

• 52.png = "Blue" top menu text selection color
• 68.png = "Blue" menu item text selection color
• 71.png = "Blue" help menu item "Search" background color

Then recreate SArtFile.bin and put into place :

./sartfiletool -e artfiles SArtFile.bin SArtFile.new.bin
sudo cp SArtFile.new.bin /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreUI.framework/Resources/SArtFile.bin

Logout & log in again, menu should look something like this (I cheated and used the turquoise-ish files from "Lion Pulse" mod.)

Additional remarks: The SArtFile is poorly documented for Lion, here's the explanation of the contents for Snow Leopard but Lion's is different. The selection in Finder is still the harsher blue, haven't looked into that yet.

There is not really a setting with in Xcode 4 to configure external editors as there use to be in Xcode 3.

The workaround is to set up your preferred text editor to open the file types that you want. And then right click on a source file in Xcodes Project Navigator and select "Open with External Editor..."

This suggestion of using "Open with External Editor..." at first will probably just open in Xcode a standalone window, since by default Xcode will probably be set to the default application for opening programming source files.

Set up your preferred application/s to open source files with.

For example for each kind of source files such as .c .h .m you want to edit in your preferred editor. Open a Finder Window/s that contains each type of file you want to set your preferred editor for.

1. Right click on a source file

2. Select "Get Info"

3. Expand the "Open With:" section and select your preferred text editor to something other than Xcode.

4. Press the Change All... button.

Now when you select "Open with External Editor..." in Xcode it should open the source file in your preferred external editor.