Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Pimp your Eclipse, a collection of darker colour schemes

Since my recent disappointment with NetBeans, I figured I would make myself feel a bit better by customizing my Eclipse to almost look a little like one of the themes that come with Netbeans. Now Eclipse doesn't really cater for "Themes", more just colour schemes that you can import. There are 2 basic ways to import bulk settings...

Firstly, make a backup! (I don't wanna be blamed for lost hours :))
To do that in Eclipse, go to File > Export > Preferences and export all the preferences. This will export all your settings so you can quickly roll back.

Now the 2 ways to update (besides changing every setting manually) are:
1. Import.
If you have or download a *.epf file you can import. In Eclipse through File > Import > Preferences.

Or
2. Manual.
The settings for the basic and java editors are stored in the following 2 files:
[workspace]\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings\org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs
[workspace]\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings\org.eclipse.ui.editors.prefs

The problem with the import is that it can contain ALL the settings of the person that exported it, there is no option to only export the UI bits, so I personally prefer the Manual route, but both work fine.

So to begin, my theme, Dark Blue Eclipse:


The 2 perfs files can be downloaded from, and copied the manual way:
Download List

I tried the following theme, and quite liked it, however I did miss blue:
Prabir's Blog


I also came across the following collection of themes and what is nice with the links here is that srand did it the manual way, and the other is a clean *.epf import ( I checked the files, no unrelated settings):
srand's blog
Which actually come from:
Eclipse color themes

Inkpot:


Sula:


Vibrant Ink:


Wombat:


I have not actually tried the following site but it should be very useful if you are looking to create your own colour scheme:
Edwards research Eclipse Gen

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