Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Applying Themes to Eclipse
Applying Themes to Eclipse
by Guest Contributor Bill Mote
--> Skip to the How-To
Im new to event driven development. I stopped coding back when VB was in its infancy. I did pickup classic ASP and do enough scripting in interpreted languages to kindle the desire, but it was not until the release of Android that I genuinely got on fire about coding again.
What did I find? A lot of barriers. You wouldnt think thats true given the open and free nature of Android. Greg, aka Android Code Monkey, has put together an idiot proof tutorial on setting up the development environment. That was my first hurdle. Check. I moved on to his Hello Android tutorial. Check. Next I tried the Android Developers NotepadCodeLab tutorial. Easy enough I thought. This time you just "open the AndroidCodeLab folder" as instructed and youre moving right along.
Open it how? I tried various imports. I tried opening the source and various .xml files. All I did was build my frustration, but Im not giving up. Instead I purchased "Head First Java." The book is awesome. It focuses on teaching Java and avoiding the IDE hurdles but I decided to code the examples in Notepad++ and Eclipse so I could be 1 step ahead when I finished. The leap from C++ to Java isnt that great and things seemed to make sense so Im moving right along.
One thing I noticed about the Eclipse environment is how absolutely blinding it is! During the day its tough enough, but at night, when I get most of my keyboard cycles for development, the open IDE is exhausting on my eyes. Another hurdle ...
Cut to the chase already ...
When Greg asked me to be a guest contributor I couldnt wait to get this information posted. I want to remove as many barriers as I can for new developers like myself!
When Greg asked me to be a guest contributor I couldnt wait to get this information posted. I want to remove as many barriers as I can for new developers like myself!
My first searches for Eclipse and Themes didnt produce much and the information that was available was, or at least seemed, convoluted and complicated. Turns out changing the themes in Eclipse is very, very easy!
There are 2 files used to display the themes:
Colors are managed in this file: org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs
Text Editors are managed in this file: org.eclipse.ui.editors.prefs
Those files can be found below your Eclipse workspace folder which can be found here:
Windows -- .metadata.pluginsorg.eclipse.core.runtime.settings
Linux/MAC -- .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/
I found an archive file with 6 different themes including the "default" to easily undo any of your changes. Heres what they look like:
Inkpot
Sula
Vibrant Ink
Wombat
Zenburn
The archive contains the 6 images and 6 folders; 1 for each theme. In each folder youll find the 2 aforementioned files. Simply extract the 2 files from your desired theme into the appropriate Eclipse folder as described above and launch Eclipse!
Available link for download
