Abstract: To accommodate the fact that, not only may a window require a number of user-determined colors to display, for example, an image, the window may also need to display widgets forming a user interface within the window in distinctive user-defined colors, while still causing the minimum disturbance to other displayed windows in windowing display systems of the type having storage locations for storing a colormap which determines the colors displayed in the system corresponding to particular pixel values, and which generate a shared colormap by assigning screen colors to pixel values dynamically as the screen colors are required by tasks using the system, and allow at least some of the windows to have a private colormap which can be copied into the storage locations when the corresponding window is activated, a method of generating a private colormap for a window is disclosed characterised by: overwriting a first selected portion of the private colormap for the window with a user-determined colormap to leave a re

Abstract: A method and system for generating a private colormap for a window in a data processing system having a shared colormap. A private colormap is generated by overwriting a selected portion of a copy of the shared colormap with a user-determined colormap of the same size as the selected portion to form a modified colormap. The modified colormap is then substituted in place of the shared colormap.