blog | edwards research

The next step of our journey involved trying to recreate one of the themes we found in through Eclipse’s IDE Preferences.  Believe me, this is no easy task.  There are like 4 different places that colors, highlights and fonts are stored.

The most are stored in:  Window, Preferences, C/C++, Editor, Syntax Coloring

There you will find options to color built-in types, typedefs, pre-processor directives, strings, etc.  All the things you would expect to find.  A nice feature they have for many of the types is the ability to disable syntax coloring.  There were a few that I just chose to disable or keep disabled because it was getting too cluttered.  I still think its too cluttered actually.  Judge for yourself:

Standard Theme / Coloring

My Twilight-ish Theme / Coloring

Following the trend of having settings all over the place, these customizations are contained in four files:

• …/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.cdt.ui.prefs
• …/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs (weird, I know).
• …/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.ui.editors.prefs
• …/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.ui.prefs

The large majority of the settings are in the cdt.ui.prefs file:

semanticHighlighting.typedef.color=117,135,166
semanticHighlighting.enum.color=143,157,106
c_type=117,135,166
semanticHighlighting.functionDeclaration.color=155,133,157
useQuickDiffPrefPage=true
c_string=169,188,135
c_single_line_comment=79,148,205
useAnnotationsPrefPage=true
semanticHighlighting.macroSubstitution.color=117,135,166
semanticHighlighting.method.enabled=true
semanticHighlighting.functionDeclaration.bold=false
semanticHighlighting.macroSubstitution.italic=true
c_comment_task_tag=79,148,205
spelling_locale_initialized=true
semanticHighlighting.globalVariable.enabled=true
semanticHighlighting.method.bold=true
c_comment_task_tag_italic=true
c_braces=205,168,105
c_numbers=207,106,76
semanticHighlighting.class.color=233,192,98
semanticHighlighting.enumerator.color=143,157,106
semanticHighlighting.field.enabled=false
semanticHighlighting.macroSubstitution.enabled=true
c_keyword=233,192,98
semanticHighlighting.function.color=155,133,157
pp_default=143,157,106
c_multi_line_comment=79,148,205
semanticHighlighting.externalSDK.enabled=false
semanticHighlighting.function.enabled=true
semanticHighlighting.method.color=155,133,157
eclipse.preferences.version=1
semanticHighlighting.methodDeclaration.color=155,133,157
semanticHighlighting.problem.color=224,125,87
pp_header=143,157,106
semanticHighlighting.staticMethod.enabled=false
semanticHighlighting.globalVariable.color=207,106,76
semanticHighlighting.templateParameter.enabled=false
c_default=248,248,248
c_multi_line_comment_italic=true
semanticHighlighting.function.bold=false
c_operators=173,216,230
c_single_line_comment_italic=true
semanticHighlighting.staticField.color=155,133,157
pp_directive=233,192,98

The other places to look for coloring options are:

• Window, Preferences, General, Editors, Text Editors, Appearance Color Options
• Window, Preferences, General, Editors, Text Editors, Annotations, Occurences

I’m going to mess around and create one more theme by hand — then try to figure out the best way to implement a solution that will be full-featured and allow for easy transition between themes.  Maybe a webapplet where you can design the theme (or customize a pre-existing one) and then download it?  Who knows…