Color Themes for Eclipse?

Question

I am a recovering Emacs user, who is trying to ease into Eclipse usage. (Since I'm encouraging the rest of the team to use it, I guess I should at least try to get along).

My current excuse is that it hurts my eyes. I'm currently using the excellent zenburn theme in emacs, and would love to find it for eclipse. However, I find that changing my color theme every few months makes for a great way to procrastinate, so ideally I'd like to find a repository for eclipse color themes.

There don't appear to be any eclipse themes indexed by Google, so all the great themes must be sitting on your hard disk somewhere. Please share them.

Thanks

Answer 1

Is it possible to properly store and export/import colour themes in Eclipse? I believe this was not possible when I tried a couple of years back, and I've copied some obscure meta folder over to new machines since then. These metadata are per workspace, but I suppose they can be copied enough to be considered a "theme". FWIW, my scheme is not perfect as it just is/was too cumbersome to make finish it. In addition it was hard/impossible to make the rest of the GUI follow suit (background/foreground in lists, editors, etc). My scheme is inspired by the koehler scheme for vim.

Answer 2

It is possible to import/export colour themes in Eclipse:

File -> Import -> General -> Preferences File -> Export -> General -> Preferences

At this time I am also searching for themes, but I cannot find any.

Answer 3

Here's a guy who posted his eclipse preferences.

http://blog.codefront.net/2006/09/28/vibrant-ink-textmate-theme-for-eclipse/

I just imported the above file. It was painless.

Setting up your own color theme in Flex Builder (which is, I think, built on top of Eclipse, I think) is pretty tedious. I'd recommend looking for a preferences file to import, at least as a starting point.

Answer 4

I've posted some color schemes and an example script to extract them from Eclipse's preference files at http://eclipsecolorthemes.jottit.com/

Essentially, I'm treating an subset of the Eclipse preferences as a color scheme, and using Eclipse's import functionality to apply the colors.

Saving a color scheme involves exporting all preferences and then removing non-color settings.

Answer 5

I just found an alternative way of importing/exporting themes from Eclipse that is relatively easier (doesn't require manual editing of a file).

Essentially there are two files we want to copy or overwrite:

[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

(Side note: On Linux/Mac, the directory is [workspace]/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/, Thanks Scott)

where,

org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs = Syntax Coloring

org.eclipse.ui.editors.prefs = Text Editors

I converted anonfunc's themes from http://eclipsecolorthemes.jottit.com/ into the new format. Also I created my own :)

Finally, if somebody wants to create more themes I can post them on my blog with credits. Here are some color schemes ideas to get you going.

Download theres here: (Alt. site 1, Alt. site 2)

Theme Gallery

Inkpot

Sula (My theme)

Vibrant Ink

Wombat

Zenburn

Answer 6

First off thank you srand for your troubles, the Zenburn theme has really helped my eyes during late night programming.

That being said though I do want to point out a couple of things:

1 - The file [org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs] does not just contain color attributes and replacing it might overwrite other settings (for me it overwrote "spelling_user_dictionary=/dicts/eclipseDict.txt" and "breadcrumb.perspective=true", besides other values)

2 - The Compare editor for some of the themes makes it very difficult to see the difference between two files (especially if it's a normal text file like).

3 - Some files get really strange colors, for me the SQL files became quite unreadable.

My solution is just to copy the themes for those iknowexactlywhattochangeandwhere programming rushes and then change it back when I'm casually updating files here and there.

Hope the developers at Eclipse take heed to our whinings and make a theme editor (fingers crossed)

Cheers

Answer 7

Just wanted to note that it seems that color themes are language-specific, that is, Eclipse-CDT (for C/C++ Development) has different theme files than Eclipse-JDT (for Java Development), etc.

So far, these have been JDT themes, but since you didn't specify your language, I figure I'd throw in a link for a CDT theme.

Consider the Eclipse-CDT Theme Generator here: http://blog.edwards-research.com/2009/11/color-schemes-for-eclipse-cdt-4/

Answer 8

I've started proof of concept plug-in that manages color themes.

It's called Eclipse Pimp, and it's free software (3-clause BSD license).

Pimp is in early development and it isn't really usable yet.

http://bitbucket.org/goj/eclipse-pimp/wiki/Home

Answer 9

Hi Does anyone know if it is possible to change the entire window coloring in Eclipse? I do not mean the colors of the editors inside the windows I mean the colors of the window managers, they are awful and too bright for my eyes?

Answer 10

I loved the pre set themes. I am currently using SULA but I wasn't able to set the "hover" back ground color anywhere using the UI. With the default "yellow" 255,255,225(RGB) you are unable to see the SULA text correctly. I grep'ed the pref files for the "yellow" RGB values.

I found this file for CDT and my c++. I'm sure there will be other lang specific files to adjust.

CDT:

eclipse_workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.cdt.ui.prefs

modify or add these these lines to file. RGB is the color format. Set to value which matches your "theme". I used the SULA theme (many thanks) and so I set the hover BG to black(0,0,0).

////// modified this line
sourceHoverBackgroundColor=0,0,0

///// had to add this line
sourceHoverBackgroundColor.SystemDefault=false

Answer 11

Your prompt: "There don't appear to be any eclipse themes indexed by Google, so all the great themes must be sitting on your hard disk somewhere. Please share them."

My answer: I am not sure whether I have a "great" theme for you but building on some experience writing a Vim colour scheme ( http://bit.ly/maroloccio_vim ) I have tried my hand at making one for Eclipse too: http://bit.ly/maroloccio_epf. (Still in its infancy, mind you, hence the v0.0.1)

Feel free to use it if you like it (do keep the header with my e-mail in it so that I may receive feedback from users) and especially feel free to customise it if you wish, the structure in it should provide ample opportunity for personalisation. It's not a migration script per se but I think if you know your way around 's/colour1/colour2/g' you should be fine with just a template! It has stubs for:

• Abstract Text Editor
• C/C++ (CDT)
• Build Console (CDT)
• Java (JDT)
• HTML (WST)
• XML (WST)
• CSS (WST)
• JavaScript (JSDT)
• Python (PyDev)
• Subversion (Tigris) ... and more.

Let me know what you think if you use it...

PS: I almost forgot - here's a screenshot of it highlighting Java. http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/o7mWcx9G8TMXoU80S--_uw

Answer 12

FWIW, I've created a Github mirror for the color schemes on eclipsecolorthemes.jottit.com/. It includes the epf2colorscheme.sh script and can be found on github.com/demonkoryu/eclipse-color-schemes.

Answer 13

Awesome, BUT how would you modify say, a hibernate tools editor's color or how would I find the preference file for the hibernate tools HQL editor or any other plugin? I have like twenty plugins managed by YOXOS (plugin manager)