mind the content

The first time I’ve seen a MacBook was the first time I’ve seen the Textmate editor. On that day I fell in love with the Vibrant Ink colour theme it’s owner was using.

It was aesthetic, it was colourful, it didn’t tire my eyes as much as my default black-on-white Eclipse editor. On that day I found an Eclipse version of the theme which, with some small modifications, I’ve been using since then.

The mentioned Eclipse version, while nice, had some problems. Colouring wasn’t consistent between editors, some of them were not configured and code was unreadable on a black background, also some colours were different than the original. It was slightly irritating, but not enough to do something about it. Until today.

I took the original theme, merged with what I got before and applied consistently across editors. What I got is much closer to the original: the only things I changed deliberately are background (greyish - to reduce contrast) and keyword colour (a bit less saturated). Also the 11px Monaco font is much better than the Eclipse’s default Courier New used in the original Eclipse version. I configured all the editors I had, i.e.: text, structured text, ant, java, javascript, php, css, html, dtd, xml, xsl. The configuration was tested on Eclipse 3.6 (Helios) RC 2, but should work well with both earlier and future releases.

To install the theme you need to install the font (if you don’t have it yet) and then import the eclipse preferences file (File -> Import -> Preferences). The file is stripped and contains only syntax colouring configuration, but anyway, I recommend making a backup of your preferences before applying the theme (File -> Export -> Preferences).

Download here and enjoy!

update (2010-07-18):
I added the support for CDT editors (C / C++ and Makefile)!