Preserve selected color when switching markers / defaultColorsFollowCurrentColors from v2

[anisabboud]

Thank you for continuing to improve marker.js! ⭐

I just migrated from v2 to v3 but ran into a missing feature from v2: defaultColorsFollowCurrentColors ailon/markerjs2#21,
which enables the user to preserve last selected color when switching markers.

The AnnotationEditorSettings mostly cover rendererSettings but no preserve selected color option.
https://markerjs.com/docs-v3/interfaces/marker.js_ui.annotationeditorsettings

markerjs-ui/src/lib/AnnotationEditor.ts

Lines 45 to 90 in b619da3

	export interface AnnotationEditorSettings {
	/**
	* Whether the rasterized image should be rendered on save.
	* If set to false the `editorsave` event will not contain the `dataUrl` property.
	*/
	renderOnSave?: boolean;
	/**
	* Configuration for the image renderer.
	* This is used to configure the image rendering settings.
	*/
	rendererSettings: {
	/**
	* Whether the image should be rendered at the original (natural) target image size.
	*/
	naturalSize?: boolean;
	/**
	* Rendered image type (`image/png`, `image/jpeg`, etc.).
	*/
	imageType?: string;
	/**
	* For formats that support it, specifies rendering quality.
	*
	* In the case of `image/jpeg` you can specify a value between 0 and 1 (lowest to highest quality).
	*
	* @type {number} - image rendering quality (0..1)
	*/
	imageQuality?: number;
	/**
	* When set to true, only the marker layer without the original image will be rendered.
	*/
	markersOnly?: boolean;
	/**
	* When set and `naturalSize` is `false` sets the width of the rendered image.
	*
	* Both `width` and `height` have to be set for this to take effect.
	*/
	width?: number;
	/**
	* When set and `naturalSize` is `false` sets the height of the rendered image.
	*
	* Both `width` and `height` have to be set for this to take effect.
	*/
	height?: number;
	};
	}

[ailon]

Hi there,

Thank you for the kind words!

Well, marker.js UI is meant like a "kitchen sink" drop in for those who want a quick editor without much customization. It doesn't have most of the customization options v2 has. If you want to make something customizable you should build your own UI over marker.js 3 (or just fork markerjs-ui and extend it according to your needs).

Alan.

[anisabboud]

Thank you for the clarification. The UI you've created looks great.
(Perhaps I should've opened this request in the markerjs3 repository, since this is not a "UI" thing, but rather a global setting for markerjs to remember the user's seleced color.)

I believe this should be the default behavior, without having to configure it.
For instance, if you try the Windows 11 snipping tool: When you select a color, it remembers the color you selected so that you can make multiple marks using the same color (it even remembers the color you selected across sessions, but we don't need to go that far here).

20250929-0640-09.7136731.mp4

(Possibly related: WCAG accessibility guideline for "Redundant Entry": "Don't ask for the same information twice in the same activity.")

At the moment it's just a bit annoying if you want to make multiple marks with the same color, to have to reopen the markerjs color menu and re-select the same color each time. But it's no big deal.

[ailon]

You may be right that this should've been the default behavior but doing it now would be a breaking change. And if not the default, adding a flag to enable it on the main marker.js 3 library is of little value as it's not hard to implement in the custom UI code.

I'll consider adding the flag to marker.js UI though.