Colorful UI Settings

Making your EVE Online client your own is one thing that the game has always given it's player. Unlike many other MMOs, you're given the ability to rearrange your UI exactly how you want it, but what about all those pretty colorful interfaces you might see from other players? Well, in this article I will cover how to accomplish this, as well as getting those nifty in-game ANSI icons as well.


Color Tabs

The first little change you can make is in the overview tabs. By opening the overview settings, and navigating to the "Overview Tabs" tab, you can use basic HTML to change the color or font type on your tabs by placing code into the "Tab Name"; like so:

<color=red><b>PvP</b></color>

If you know a little about HTML, and even if you don't; you might see that this line will output a bold red text saying "PvP", and that's exactly what is done. As this is just an example you can make it however you want with any text you please. I'll go over a few different tags that can be used.

<color=colorname></color> : Text color (i.e. red, orange, yellow, green, blue, cyan, white, black, darkred, etc)
<b></b> : Bold
<i></i> : Italic
<u></u> : Underline

* Keep in mind, all tags need to wrap around the text you want it to effect like shown in the example above.
* You cannot add formatting from the "Change Label" mode. It has to be done from the overview settings, overview tabs' "Tab Name".

Color Brackets

Now the colored bracket text is a bit more complicated. The reason being, is that you have to alter your global settings manually, but first make sure to export your global settings via the overview export. You will need to export the "Global Settings" alone, so that no other settings are in the file. If you don't know how to export these settings, or don't know how to export from inside a station check this article. Once you have a backup file of your global settings exported, we're ready to alter them.

For this next part, you might consider using an editor with XML syntax highlighting like Notepad++.   The reason being is that if a tag is left open, you will not be able to import it. An editor with syntax highlighting will tell you when a tag has not been closed. So now open the XML file your exported with your Global settings, and take a quick glance at the structure. The portions we will be changing are the "label" blocks. As you can probably see, there is corporation, pilot, alliance, ship name, and ship type. Each block has four different attributes; pre, state, type, and post. The pre and post attributes are what we need to change to alter our colors.


<label>
<part name="pre" value=" &lt;fontsize=14&gt;&lt;b&gt;"/>
<part name="state" value="1"/>
<part name="type" value="corporation"/>
<part name="post" value="&lt;/b&gt; "/>
</label>

Here's an example of one of the labels, specifically the corporation label. As you see in the "pre" value, I have added <fontsize=14><b> to the beginning of the label block, and </b> on the post attribute. As I'm sure you've noticed, for formatting purposes we need to change the greater than, and less than signs to unicode so that we can import the file like so:

< = &lt;   
> = &gt; 

So to explain this a bit further, the "pre" handles all the opening tags for that label, where the "post" deals with the closing tags. As you might have noticed, I did not close the fontsize tag. The reason behind this is that I have it closed in another label. If you leave a tag open like that, it will spread across the other labels until it finds a closing tag. Once you have something you want to test, make sure you import from the station, and then your settings will apply after undocking; since they will not apply while in space. If for some reason the file doesn't show anything to import, that means you've left an open tag  somewhere in the code, usually from the original global file code.

After you alter each one to your liking, your bracket text will end up looking something like the screenshot below.

If you're having issues and need an example, or you just like the colors from the above screenshot, you can download the global file here.

As a bonus feature, you can also add text to your text output, and modify the color it shows as well.

Alt Characters

Now back to something a bit simpler. Alt characters are something you see everywhere in bios, chat, or even in names, but with no real sense of where they actually came from. These symbols are in fact alt characters. You can obtain these by holding the Alt key, and typing in a numerical code on your keyboard's numpad. Once you release the Alt key, the character will show in the text input. Here are a few to give you an idea.

Alt-257 ☺
Alt-258 ☻
Alt-259 ♥
Alt-260 ♦

You can always continue testing higher numbers, and see what characters come out, as there are quite a few more.