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[jack wallstreet]

I have been using MC for years and have never figured out what it means when a tab's lettering is in red.   I Thought it might be the active tab, but that doesn't seem to be it.  Sometimes it stay red, sometimes it doesn't.   Can some please illuminate me

[JimH]

I have been using MC for years and have never figured out what it means when a tab's lettering is in red.   I Thought it might be the active tab, but that doesn't seem to be it.  Sometimes it stay red, sometimes it doesn't.   Can some please illuminate me

Did you try other skins?  I don't know.

[HPBEME]

The tab font color is controlled by the skin, and different skins use different font colors, but... I personally am unaware of any skin that uses red text for tabs... Which skin are you using?

There are four tab "states" to which different font colors can be assigned: active tab, inactive tab, mouse-over over active tab, mouse-over inactive tab (however, it is not required that different colors are used for each of these states). Is the red text associated with any of these tab states?  I suppose it is possible that if you are using MC's "skin effects" tool to invert skin colors, then a tab's text that was blue would be red when inverted. But I imagine you would've mentioned that you had inverted skin colors if that were the case.

There is one location where MC overrides the skin's specified font color with red, and that is the search box. If you apply search criteria via search wizard, and then hover your mouse over the search box text, the word "Wizard" will turn red - and this applies to every single skin.

All that said… I'm pretty sure none of it applies. Just wanted to cover the bases. When you say "sometimes it stays red, sometimes it doesn't", that implies the text turns red randomly. I personally have never seen this happen in over 15 years of using MC, and and am unaware of any usage or workflow that would cause it to happen. No doubt how we use MC differs, and perhaps your use case invokes an override that I have never seen. To me it seems like it would have to be an override, because again, the "normal" (i.e., non-red) text colors are driven by the skin itself.

[jack wallstreet]

Thank you all very much.  Just knowing it is skin controlled is very helpful.  I have been using modern cards: grey.  I have switched to Z and the red seems to have gone away, at least at a quick glance.  Thank you!

Edit: I am also thinking the mouse-over state may have been a factor in sometimes it's red and sometimes it isn't.

[HPBEME]

I just confirmed that for the modern cards gray skin, the active tab mouseover state text color is indeed red (not pure red, but reddish).

When using that skin, if you click on a previously inactive tab the text will turn red as you click on it, and the red color remains red even after you move your mouse off of the tab. Once you click on anything else though, the text color reverts to the skins specified active tab text color (dark gray/black). I believe this is what you experienced, and why you said "sometimes it stays red, sometimes it doesn't". 

This finicky text color behavior is an issue in a few places in every skin, and is one of the reasons I chose not to use unique text colors for each of the four tab states on the skin I created. I simply used two text colors... one for active & active mouseover, and one for inactive & inactive mouseover. Otherwise, it just seemed like overkill of flashing text colors as you hovered over tabs.

If you want to still use the modern cards skin gray but stop the strange red text behavior, you could modify the skin XML file yourself. You would just need to make the active tab/active tab mouseover text colors the same - both red, or both black, or both whatever color. Bottom line, if you make them the same it will stop the text color from behaving weirdly.

Note that if you do this, every time there is an MC update your edits will be replaced - all the modern cards skins are part of the default download, and thus all those skins get overwritten with each MC update. So not only do you need to copy the existing skin into a new folder, but you must also modify the first line in the XML that has a variable for the skin name. The name specified within the XML file is the name you see in the view menu skin list - NOT the folder name.  It is kind of hard to explain, but if you decide to play with this, you will see what I mean.

[jack wallstreet]

Thank you!