Eclipse Color Theme

Color themes for Eclipse.

Please note: The repository has been moved to http://github.com/eclipse-color-theme/eclipse-color-theme and this one is no longer updated.

Eclipse Color Theme makes it possible to switch color themes conveniently and without side effects. Support for importing themes is planned.

You can install the plugin from the update site. After installing, go to Window->Preferences->General->Appearance->Color Theme to change the color theme.

When updating the plugin via Eclipse, go to the preferences page and press OK once, otherwise you won't see any changes. We're planning to fix this.

Rationale

While Eclipse allows you to change the syntax coloring in great detail, there is no support for managing multiple color themes. It is possible to achieve that by importing and exporting preferences files, but this is inconvenient and likely to mess up your preferences. Furthermore, color themes have to be created for every single editor, a theme for the Java editor does not change the XML, JavaScript or any other editors. This plugin solves these issues by mapping a generic color theme format to specific preferences entries for each supported editor.

Editors and themes

Eclipse Color Theme currently supports the following editors:

• Text
• Java
• Java properties
• XML
• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• C++
• PHP
• Ant
• SQL

Available themes:

• Inkpot
• Zenburn
• Vibrant Ink
• Oblivion

Adding a theme

To create a new theme, you'll have to get the source and build the plugin until theme importing/exporting is implemented.

Create an XML file in the com.github.fhd.eclipsecolortheme.themes package next to zenburn.xml and change the colour values until you're satisfied. Then add the file name to the constant FILE_NAMES in ColorThemeManager.

The keys are quite Java-specific right now, but the entries are mapped to other editors (e.g. the method key is used for XML/HTML tags). To see all possible keys, have a look at the constants in ColorThemeKeys.

Adding an editor

If you would like to add an editor, proceed as follows:

1. Go to the syntax coloring preferences page of the editor, e.g. C/C++->Editor->Syntax Coloring.

2. Look at the colour theme keys of one theme (I suggest you use Zenburn for that) in this plugin's ColorThemeManager class and set up the syntax colouring using the colours defined there.

3. Open the editor's preferences file, e.g. workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.cdt.ui.prefs and create a new subclass of ThemePreferenceMapper where you map the colour theme's keys to those of the editor.

License

Copyright (C) 2011 Felix H. Dahlke and Roger Dudler

This is open source software, licensed under the Eclipse Public License. See the file COPYING for details.