Color schemes for Sublime Text 2 and Textmate | Hacker News Reader

Color schemes for Sublime Text 2 and Textmate

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179 pointsusaphp81 comments

Nice themes! It's pretty cool to see all these screenshots and the background color leaking into the tabs... I'm the designer of the Sublime Text UI theme and Jon was adamant about making the tab background using the color of the theme background color. It was really, really hard (lots of PNGs and lots of switching between PNGs depending on the luminosity of the background color, lots of pixel tweaking) and it's not perfect for all luminosity values, but these screenshots make it look pretty snazzy :)

So, do you have any updates on ST2 development? The quiet has been going for too long :)

ST2 is out. Your ST1 licence should work with ST2 which is nice of them.

Not guarantees that's the case for ST3.

Oh and you could have been using the development builds for ST2 for quite some time, it worked quite nicely for me.

Sure, I mean there haven't been new releases for a while :) thanks anyway

I think these are all quite nice, however... am I the only person out there who likes comments to show up in a nice bright color (my preference, usually a bright terminal green). The faded comment look that most of these share is really hard for me to read.

I was gonna make a similar comment. All the themes I see are geared to be anti comment because of the lack of distinction in colors.

Right now I use the Tomorrow Night theme which seems to be okay but I would prefer to have a good light color scheme (the longest I ever used one was Espresso Soda theme).

Love love love the Tomorrow Night theme with comments. Though I would much rather have brighter comments.

That's an easy fix. Also, this plugin https://github.com/Monnoroch/ColorHighlighter will help you with the colors.

Me too, they just look like empty space to me. I cycle between three, really like Tomorrow-night-blue https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19746944/themes.png

Yeah, even my minimalist theme keeps comments salient: http://i.imgur.com/4uYrH.png.

For me, hard to read is the point. Comments are something I want to be able to focus on and consume, but disappear if I'm not focussed on them.

That's a great point. I would love some sort of effect where if I've clicked on the comment block it is a lighter colour, otherwise it goes back to the default colour.

You could select it and get a good highlighted color.

I prefer faded comments, because some of my code is quite heavily commented. The code itself is what I always read, and I want it to jump out at me. The comments are background info, observations, sometimes wordy descriptions of why things are the way they are, and so on. If I've been away from the code for a while, I'll read the comments to help reestablish the context, refresh my memory of failed experiments, of shortcuts, optimizations, and so on. Most of the time, I don't need to read these comments, so having them faded into the background works for me in every way except for the briefer, more urgent type of comment that SHOULD jump out.

One thing I would like to have is an editor that responded to tags within comments (so it wouldn't be a part of the programming lang syntax, but just a convention used by the programmer) which would apply different colors to different types of comments. I would then use a faded color for wordy background info or comments needed by anyone proposing to change the code but not needed for reading the code, brighter colors for brief comments on the intent of a chunk of code (making the code easier to skim) and maybe a very bright color for WARNING, or FIXME, or STUB-ONLY, or TODO, etc.

I kinda disagree; if your comments, observations etc don't JUMP OUT AT YOU READ THIS THIS IS IMPORTANT!1one, they're not important, apparently. This also goes for other people's code, really. There is often a difference between code and comments, which causes people to read the code instead of the comments. However, one cause is that comments don't draw the attention because they're often in a dimmed, 'this is not important' color scheme - the other is that there's too much comments that don't add value to the code.

I found this thread fascinating. It seems the more heavily people comment, the less they care about reading comments all the time: http://akkartik.name/blog/2012-11-24-18-10-36-soc.

It's almost like there's a law of conservation at work. The law of conservation of human attention. Comments can be used either as background hum or as salient landmarks.

> context, failed experiments, shortcuts, optimizations, and so on.

I think commit messages are the appropriate place for this stuff; I use `git annotate` etc. to find the information when I need it. I often have a 50-line commit message accompanying a one-line code change -- a ratio that would obviously make the code unreadable if all the comments were in-line with the code itself.

I really love the Tomorrow Theme - https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme

Tomorrow (and base16, its next incarnation) are awesome. But there's one thing I like about Pastie more: the way it highlights literal strings (and heredocs and herestrings)...

look at this image: http://steverandytantra.com/gridfs/4fff15cc1c1cc6a0cb00000c-...

Hmm... Adding it was easier than I thought.

Screenshot: http://d.pr/i/5rF3

Patch: https://github.com/pooriaazimi/tomorrow-theme/commit/978f1be...

You may be interested in "Made of Code" http://madeofcode.com/posts/29-photo-my-new-textmate-theme-8...

Sample of Made of code theme in SL2: http://d.not.mn/made_of_code_sample.png (the code is https://github.com/openstack/swift/blob/master/swift/proxy/c...)

I have tried a couple of color scheme and for me Made Of Code is the best, by far!

Carlcalderon's color schemes are also very nice, especially Stereokai, Calydon and Tyrann Alex. Check it out: https://github.com/carlcalderon/sublime-color-schemes

Open Terminal...

  cd /Users/dan/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2/Packages
  git clone https://github.com/daylerees/colour-schemes

In Sublime -> Preferences -> Color Scheme

But this would require git, right? i use mercurial and don't have git installed.

Nobody's stopping you from installing Git alongside Mercurial; even if you're not going to use it on a day to day basis, things like sublime text themes and whatnots are easily installed with a git clone.

Yeah use the right tool for the job, and don't be afraid to try out others, even if you've already 'picked a stack' for your latest project.

Replace the second step with this then:

    curl -L https://github.com/daylerees/colour-schemes/archive/master.tar.gz | tar -zxf -

I use a very simple color scheme for Textmate. Basically black text on a light-yellowish background, with only string literals and comments in a subdued color. I have found that syntax highlighting with many colors distracts from the code. http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/textmate-colorscheme...

Hi all,

Dayle Rees here, glad you like my themes! If you do, please remember to star the repo! Also if you like some of the themes, but would prefer them slightly different, please let me know using the github issues feature and I will create an alternate version! Also taking requests the same way!

Thanks!

I like the colours, but the schemes are incomplete. Most egregiously, there is no colour setting for variables, which affects Ruby, where you want instance variables ("@foo") to be colorized.

The colorization for indent guides is much too high-contrast for me. I don't look at indent guides unless I am "lost" in a particular region of nesting.

Likewise, too much contrast for trailing spaces. Sure, I want to see when I am erroneously inserting trailing whitespace myself, but I often have to work on other people's files, and I don't such a file to light up like a Christmas tree when it's full of trailing spaces. (And usually I don't want to fix them, either. It's bad gitiquette to correct other people's bad tabs/trailing space unless you are intentionally creating a patch to fix those things.)

Screen shots comparing my current theme (modified version of Monokai) with yours: http://i.imgur.com/dkcPh.png, http://i.imgur.com/WYubo.png. (Notice subtle indent/space colorization, and variable colorization.)

+1 for instance variable colorization

This is my theme, if anyone is interested: https://gist.github.com/4140677

By changing the general theme, the background color of the build panel won't change automatically (screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/35N6Z.png).

You can change the build panel's background color (in Ubuntu) by editing the ~/.config/sublime-text/\Packages\Theme - Default\Widget.sublime-settings file and replacing the current line in the file with

   "color_scheme": "Packages/Color Scheme - Default/<insert-your-current-theme>.tmTheme"

Also, if you get a messed up window when changing UI themes (happens in W7), two F11's (fullsreen) make it ok again.

Does anyone know of a them for Sublime that looks exactly like Chrome?

This is the best theme I've found: https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme

Thanks!

For Chrome like tab styles, set "soda_classic_tabs": true in your user config.

The font color for comments is too close to the background color -- could use some more contrast. This goes for almost all of the included themes.

I'm a huge fan of Phoenix Theme and Color Schemes. https://github.com/netatoo/phoenix-theme

It's based off Soda Theme. Currently I'm using Tomorrow-Night Color Scheme, but I'm digging the Dark Green and Dark Blue too. You can also configure color of folders and tabs.

At http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/community (package control website), there are tons of color schemes (just search for scheme) with their corresponding github repo (most of them with screenshots to preview).

Something with less colors: https://raw.github.com/mihaifm/Visual-Studio.tmTheme/master/...

Any vim ports?

You can convert any Textmate/ST2 theme to Vim using this tool: http://coloration.sickill.net/

I've used it myself, it works great.

It seems to be not working at the moment.

"An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments."

That app does not seem to be working correctly ATM, but you can use the commandline tools for converting: https://github.com/sickill/coloration

Coloration is fantastic - the converted VIM versions of the schemes are in the repository now.

I made this some time ago: https://gist.github.com/3747038

It's my attempt to port the "koehler" vim scheme into Sublime text. Might be incomplete, but at least looks similar.

I was just looking for 'torte' the other day, and couldn't find it. This one is very similar, ty.

Obligatory plug for my own Dogs colour scheme: https://github.com/radiosilence/dogs-colour-scheme

Awesome selection I especially like the font!

There is plenty of themes listed here as well http://textmatetheme.com/

Seems like this is now available in Sublime Package Control via the "Dayle Rees Color Schemes" package name.

Install instructions would be helpful.

Install ST2 Package Manager (http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control)

Cmd+Shift+P -> "Install..." -> [name of theme] -> [enter] -> done.

(editted) Ugh, apparently these are not in the package manger. Call me lazy but I'm not going to clone these on all four of the machines I use ST2 on. (The "ugh" seems unappreciative, that was more due to my incorrect assumption; don't mean to sound ungrateful, a couple of these look very excellent.)

Lazy ass...

@hayksaakian, Add

   "color_scheme": "/home/victor/documents/Iceberg.tmTheme"

to your Preferences.sublime-settings with corrected path.

... Well, I did say "call me lazy".

Sorry, I have half a dozen color schemes in different packages that I switch between, a custom theme, several language plugins and more. It's enough work to re-install them through the package manager.

I could put them all in a folder and sync that across machines, but then they don't get auto-updated, and I'd have to use non-portable symlinks and would still have to manually update each of the likely 10 repos that I'd need to check regularly for updates.

So... I did :)

May I ask why you have multiple color schemes? It seems like a pretty easy solution...

It sounds stupid, but I have one that I'm very accustomed to to write my C, another for Golang and then one that looks much better for editting XML(-like) documents.

>I'm not going to clone these on all four of the machines I use ST2 on.

I use a portable version of Sublime 2 synced via Dropbox. It works pretty well. One copy of settings/themes/snippets.

AFAIK, Portable version of Sublime Text 2 is only available on Windows

Was getting too many conflicts moving from home to work, trying to sync only Packages/User with Git now.

You can add any Github (or Bitbucket) repository to Package Control.

I can't get it to work. I add the git web url, I restart sublime, go to install and the themes don't show up as options...

I just did it. You don’t get the individual themes, you get a single package with all themes called “Dayle Rees Color Schemes”.

I know I'm 10 days late but I really appreciate this now that I see that theme. Thanks!

Sublime Text's themes are stored in /Users/.../Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2/Packages/Color Scheme-Default (on the Mac). Just copy and paste.

It seems they can be anywhere though - I've just put some on Packages/User to sync to my git repo.

I know, right? How is this missing? For Sublime on Ubuntu:

Create folder NewThemes in ~/.config/sublime-text-2/Packages/NewThemes and dump the files from the repository in there. Then Preferences > Color Scheme > NewThemes > [choose]

Doing that just messes up my default font. And am not sure what the default font is to get it back.

Ah should have been better if via Package control

sweet ...but every time I find a new favorite color scheme, it only lasts for a week max ...after this some part of my brain pulls me into changing back to my good ol' Visual Studio-like color scheme ...wonder if this happens to anyone else too

Looking at these makes me want to write code again. Clean, elegant code. Weird.

Stranger yet, the code example is PHP.

i'm using carbonight now because i'm a boring person

What is the font used in the screenshots?

The editor used in the screenshots is Sublime Text 2 on Mac OSX with the font Source Code Pro.

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro....

Awesome. Thanks!

That font changes so much with "font_options": ["directwrite"], on and off - any idea which one is closer to the designer intentions?

Gorgeous, many thanks!

can you add the default theme from smultron/fraise??

Very well balanced color palettes, beautiful. Thanks for this!

Does anyone know how to convert them to Xcode? I googled around but didn't find anything to get the job done.

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