As an example, let's look at how you change the colors used by the development system.
In the global configuration file are the following tag and configuration details:
[MF-ATTRIBUTES] SYS-ATT-01 : BLACK ON BLACK SYS-ATT-02 : YELLOW ON RED SYS-ATT-03 : BROWN ON BLACK SYS-ATT-04 : YELLOW ON BLACK SYS-ATT-05 : CYAN ON BLACK SYS-ATT-06 : WHITE ON BLACK . . .
The word before -ATTRIBUTES is called the prefix; it indicates which application or part of the development system these settings apply to. In this case it is MF- because this feature affects the whole development system. The development system reads this to determine the colors to use on the screen.
Suppose you want to change the menus to have a black background with green text. You need to find out which SYS-ATT- line specifies the menu colors. Information on configuring color is is in the chapter Configuring your Applications in your Program Development Guide.
From that chapter you find that the menu-text color is SYS-ATT-03.
If you are a system administrator in a network or multi-user environment you change the installation-wide default colors by editing the global configuration file. Just change the entry to:
SYS-ATT-03 : GREEN ON BLACK
If you want to make the change only for an individual user you change the local configuration file, adding:
[MF-ATTRIBUTES] SYS-ATT-03 : GREEN ON BLACK
Now, after the development system reads the colors from the global configuration file, the menu color SYS-ATT-03 will be overridden by the setting defined in the local configuration file.