How do I change the Console colour of Arduino IDE? Leading on from the question Can I change font Color and/or Type for IDE 1.5.6r2?, in 1.6.0, or 1.6.11 it does not seem to be possible to change console.color or console.error.color. To be precise, you can change the settings in the preferences.txt2 file, but they appear to be ignored when the IDE is restarted. Have these become hard coded?  I see from the preference.txt example file that 

# Some colors have been hardcoded into the source in app/ in order to ensure
# consistency with the images distributed and stored with the application.
# They have been commented out below so that users who install an old
# version of the software will not get incorrect colors left-over from this
# config file.


However, the settings to which I refer are not commented out, and so would led me to believe that they can be changed. Orange text on black is just horrific to read.

For example:

console.error.color=#FFF000
console.color=#FFCCCC


but I still get white/orange(red?) text for the output and error messages respectively.

I am making the edits while the Arduino IDE is not running. 



1 In 1.6.3 the ignored console.color etc. lines appear to have been removed from the preferences.txt file. 

2 C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Arduino15\preferences.txt
It turns out that the theme.txt configuration file is not located alongside the preferences.txt file, but alongside/under the Arduino application's .jar files. Thus, for the current version (1.6.3):


on OS X, .../Arduino-1.6.3.app/Contents/Java/lib/theme/theme.txt
on Win7, C:\Program Files\Arduino\lib\theme\theme.txt
on Linux, .../arduino-1.6.3/lib/theme/theme.txt
on Windows 10, when installed as an App, C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\ArduinoLLC.ArduinoIDE_1.8.10.0_x86__mdqgnx93n4wtt\lib\theme\theme.txt, however it does not seem possible to edit it - it can be opened in notepad++ but a save fails.


See an associated Github issue, IDE Background and print color options needed, for a little more discussion.