What makes a really good color theme for your code? I don’t even know. I’m blindly following other people’s examples and trying to find something that works for me. Sometimes I’ll stumble across awesome text editors that have great default themes, and sometimes I’ll bump into threads on forums that have a bunch of screenshots.
I tried to write out what I’d like in list form, and this is what I came up with:
- I’d like a dark theme, as I do a lot of late-night coding. White backdrops just hurt the eyes with brightness!
- I know that a flat-black backdrop makes for some quick eyestrain.
- I don’t like it when a particular element really grabs my attention; if boolean values are bright orange, I get angry!
- I personally like earth-tones; browns and greens.
- I also like the old flourescent-green monitors of yester-year and also The Matrix.
- I want the main body of text – the things I’ll be looking at the most – to be easily readable.
After searching for a while I decided I’d build my own theme. I had seemed to find those elements separately in other themes, but never together in one package.
Here’s what I came up with:
This is actually my third attempt at making a theme and I think it’s the best one yet… But it’s always evolving. I’d be interested to hear what other people look for in a theme (and any comments on this one in particular)! Maybe someday I’ll come across something I can consider perfect.
I used to have a thing for making my comments bright yellow, but I’m veering away from that for the first time as a test. :)
Download here! If you have FlashDevelop installed, just double click the file and re-start the application. I’ve only coded the AS3 language extension, so if you use Haxe or something you won’t get this effect.
Nice! Fun fact, the human eye can distinguish between different greens far more accurately than blues or reds, so basing your theme around green makes a lot of sense!
Oh wow! I uh… totally knew that and was aiming to leverage that effect….??? haha
I actually find it pleasing in your screenshot, though never tried the earth-tones myself. Always went with bright primary colors on a black background.
I think a quest for the perfect flash develop theme is great. I find it difficult to imagine that I would use this theme though, just because the different types and parts don’t jump out at me very much. That might be just my own perception of color of course, but I always like to look at code and the types, syntax etc jump out at me (I don’t like notepad too much). Of course, the subtlety and lack of vivid, eye destroying color is great though and I think many people are going to like it :D
I’ve been using it for about an hour now, and I’m really liking it so far!
Just updated to fix the punctuation and braces being white. :) They should now appear brownish (also updated the screenshot, might need to ctrl-f5 to see it)
Apparently, the blue part of the RGB spectrum actually causes your body to stop producing melanin which affects your ability to sleep. So by settin your theme with a black background, you’re actually helping yourself get to sleep once you’ve finished.
Nice work, I’ll definitely check this out.
Interesting. So the idea is to highlight the most important bits in white and make everything else less kind of blend into the background? I agree that comments should be darkest of all instead of yellow, but I think perhaps class names are important enough to warrant a brighter shade of green.
I’m not sure trying to put yourself to sleep is a good reason to go with the black background (CoffeeOnimal) but I’ve never felt that effect with white on black displays. Mostly, I just feel like some kind of super 1337 hacker hacking the Matrix.
I grew up with the black DOS prompt and often color-modifed it with my autoexec.bat file, so black backdrops just make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. :) I don’t feel the sleepy/unsleepy effect though, but maybe it’s affecting me and I don’t even know it?
@Sarah: I tend to get less confused when things of my own creation are one colour, and things that are referencing other creations (or my own previous creations) are another colour. That way there’s a very clear distinction between when I fuck up a class name or start using reserved keywords by mistake.
The white I’m using here is actually pretty dim, not all F’s across the hex board. And I think the important greens stand out quite a bit. I just have to distinguish between them.
The thing that annoys me the most with color schemes is when something actively grabs your attention. Like, some have booleans as florescent Orange on an otherwise drab backdrop, and I can’t help but stare at it, always!
One way to stop something from standing out is to make EVERYTHING stand out (Sos’ theme!), but that just makes my eyes overload and want to explode. kinda like hotdog stand for win 3.1.
Btw, it’s really easy to modify the AS3 color scheme file for use with Haxe. There’s a clearly marked section in the XML starting with and ending with . Just copy that section from AS3.xml over to Haxe.XML and you’re in business. I think it will also work for the other programming languages FD supports, but won’t work for XML, HTML or CSS.
Theme looks very nice, but what about whole IDE? http://i.imgur.com/BsWPk.png
I tried to use dark themes few times, but, because of the difference between the editor and interface, I always return to the white theme.
Can you share screenshot of IDE?
Good tip pekuja, I’ll give it a go.
@Maxim: Yeah the rest of the IDE colorization is a bit trickier, I’ve submitted feature requests to that end. :)
Heya Hu-Man,
An O/T kind of question, I’d like to ask you a few questions about Star Control 2. I’m doing a school paper on the game and I would like to know your thoughts on the game’s rules, systems, mechanics and what are the different game types are in it in your opinion.
I’d appreciate your input. =D
Cheers
Have you looked at Solarized Dark? You might benefit from some of his color theory by making the brighter elements a bit easier on the eyes.
http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
Best theme for flash develop so far, think ill stick with it for some time, thx and well done!
hi there, i am from china ,i am really like your flash develop theme, bu i couldn’t download from your link ,so could you send your theme to my email hutckim@126.com ?
best appreciate.