Serial Monitor text highlight invisible when using "Light High Contrast" theme

[frankcohen]

Describe the problem

When using the "Light High Contrast" IDE UI theme, no highlight is visible for text selected in the "Serial Monitor" view.

To reproduce

1. Select File > Preferences... (or Arduino IDE > Settings... for macOS users) from the Arduino IDE menus.
2. Select "Light" from the "Theme" menu.
3. Click the "OK" button.
4. Upload any sketch that produces serial output:

   void setup() {
     Serial.begin(9600);
     while (!Serial) {}
     delay(200);
     Serial.println("The original machine had a base-plate of prefabulated aluminite, surmounted by a\n malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings\n were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of\n six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that\n side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal\n lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-bovoid slots in the stator, every\n seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversible tremie pipe to the\n differential girdlespring on the \"up\" end of the grammeters.");
   }
   void loop() {}

5. Open the "Serial Monitor" view.
6. Click and drag the mouse pointer across the text in the "Serial Monitor" view.
   🙂 The selected text is highlighted by a contrasting background color:
   
7. Select File > Preferences... (or Arduino IDE > Settings... for macOS users) from the Arduino IDE menus.
8. Select "Light High Contrast" from the "Theme" menu.
9. Click the "OK" button.

🐛 There is no highlight on the selected text:

Expected behavior

Text selected in "Serial Monitor" is highlighted in some way regardless of which supported theme is selected.

Arduino IDE version

69b7365

Operating system

• macOS
• Windows

Operating system version

• macOS Sonoma 14.0 (23A344)
• Windows 11

Additional context

Same behavior in:
arduino-ide_nightly-20230804_macOS_64bit
and Arduino IDE 2.2.1

---

The low level functionality of the highlight works fine even though it is not visible. You can copy the invisibly highlighted text to the clipboard as usual.

Issue checklist

• I searched for previous reports in the issue tracker
• I verified the problem still occurs when using the latest nightly build
• My report contains all necessary details

[per1234]

Thanks for your report @frankcohen. I tried it on my macOS Sonoma machine and found that highlighting by doing a click and drag in the Serial Monitor view works as expected:

Please try to replicate the click and drag action shown in my screencast above and then comment here to tell us whether the Serial Monitor content is highlighted.

There are some known bugs related to highlighting text in Serial Monitor:

• Serial Monitor text selection starts from beginning instead of location selected by mouse cursor #247
• Only the visible data can be copied from the serial Monitor #1081

However, neither of those seem to me to match the behavior you describe.

[frankcohen]

Thank you for the reply and video. Here is what I am seeing...

Issue.2266.b.mov

I get the same behavior using Night Builds: October 25, 2023 and August 15, 2023.

I don't think it's a hardware issue, yet I should tell you this is on my open-source Reflections dev board, using ESP32-S3 and JTAG over USB
https://github.com/frankcohen/ReflectionsOS/blob/main/Docs/images/CindyLou.jpg

Here are the board settings in Arduino IDE 2.2.1:
https://github.com/frankcohen/ReflectionsOS/blob/main/Docs/images/ESP32-S3_Board_Settings.jpg

I'm glad to help in any way.

-Frank

[per1234]

Thanks! That screencast was very valuable. I see now that this is a bug in the "Light High Contrast" theme you are using:

Notice that when any of the other themes are selected, the highlight is visible.

The low level functionality of the highlight works fine even though it is not visible. You can copy the invisibly highlighted text to the clipboard as usual.

[frankcohen]

Awesome, I confirm that switching to Light theme and I am able to select regions of text in the Serial Monitor panel normally. I tried it on the Dark and Dark High Contract themes and they work correctly too. Just my luck! lol -Frank

P.S. - I just got my appointment for cataract surgery this morning. Thank the team for the high contrast themes, they help me a lot.