MoonRise UI Theme

An early version of a dark UI theme for Eclipse 4+.

Requirements

• Eclipse 4.2+

Installation

• Manual:

Download moonrise_0.8.4.jar package and put it into your Eclipse \dropins\plugins\ folder;

• Update site:

Or download this plugin by using Help > Install New Software... and add the update site:

https://raw.github.com/guari/eclipse-ui-theme/master/com.github.eclipseuitheme.themes.updatesite

• Restart Eclipse and go to Window > Preferences > General > Appearance;

• Select MoonRise (standalone) or, for a little better tabs decoration, install Eclipse 4 Chrome Theme from marketplace or from here and select MoonRise;

• Rest your eyes ;)

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Fine-tuning:

There are some settings that can be changed only from the Eclipse Preferences window and that override the theme's settings by default:

• Change the colors for Content Assist:

Go to Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts then change the colors for Basic > Content Assist background color and Basic > Content Assist foreground color (eg. foreground color: #DDD, background color: #333);

• Change the colors for Console:

Go to Window > Preferences > Run/Debug > Console and modify the colors as you like (eg. Standard Out text color: #DDD, Background color: #333);

• Change the colors for Javadoc:

Go to Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts then change the colors for Java > Javadoc view background. Note that the foreground color cannot be changed and depends on system font color.

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Trouble-shooting:

Problem	Solution
The font of the title of the tabs is different	Ensure that on your machine is installed Segoe Print font.
The size of the title of the tabs is different	Eclipse does not scale it with a DPI-Aware policy. Open the downloaded jar package with an archive explorer, open /themes/css/moonrise-ui-standalone.css, search for font-size property and modify its value according to your needs then save the file.
The label of the checkboxes has a color difficult to read	It's related to a SWT bug, use a system theme that has lighter font color for buttons.
The text of the buttons has a color difficult to read (MAC-OSX)	It's related to a SWT bug, try this 'patched' version if you have this issue (no more needed for v0.8.4+).
After updating the plugin, it isn't loaded as expected	Eclipse seems to use some sorts of internal resources caching that don't work always very well. To ensure that it's not an issue related to the new plugin version, create a new workspace and import your projects here, or try with a freshly downloaded Eclipse release

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Notes:

Currently this theme uses the CSS-SWT engine introduced in the 4.2 version of the Eclipse Platform and should provide a dark style for each GUI widget that can be handled with the last version of the Eclipse SDK. This plugin has been tested with the main Eclipse Development Tool packages on Linux distributions, Windows and OSX and with the following Eclipse releases:

• Luna (4.4)
• Kepler (4.3)
• Juno (4.2.x)

It works best with a dark system theme since currently the look of some GUI widgets cannot be overriden directly in Eclipse. The more noticeable issues related to SWT are the ScrollBar widgets, the Table headers/lines and the arrows to fold/unfold contents that cannot be styled. As minor issues there are Button background color on Windows and OSX that cannot be customized (on Windows checkboxes/radio controls do not inherit font color) and some other little bugs related to the CSS engine that makes the customizations harder and unwieldy. Aside from that, the theme currently might not look perfect on each platform, but should be fully useable on all of them. The Eclipse CSS engine is still under improvement.

Syntax highlighting scheme:

You can find the one used in the screenshot here:

• RainbowDrops.epf (download and import it with Eclipse built-in Preferences import: File > Import... then select General > Preferences);

• or RainbowDrops.xml (download and import it with Eclipse Color Theme Plugin);

• or here;

Debugging and improvements

Use CSS Spy to inspect widgets properties and CSS Scratchpad or Lightweight CSS Editor to apply a quick customization. To test what elements can be modified or not with CSS, drop a line like this one: * { background-color:red; color:white; } into CSS Scratchpad (restart Eclipse to reset the theme).

Old releases:

The packages previously uploaded can be found into /com.github.eclipseuitheme.themes.plugin/bin/ folder.

References

• http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4
• http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse4/RCP/CSS
• http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/CSS/SWT_Mapping
• http://www.vogella.com/articles/Eclipse4CSS/article.html

License

Copyright (c) 2012, 2013

This is open source software, licensed under the Eclipse Public License. See the file COPYING for details.