I almost think that themes (after a certain set of core elements) need to be specialized to be good. Dawn is highly motivated by the fact that I code largely in OCaml (for instance), and it uglies up HTML something fierce. Maybe the right solution is a core theme with overlays that are activated based on the current base scope - so you would have Dawn base that included an HTML, OCaml, ruby, etc overlay.
-David
On 2/12/07, William D. Neumann wneumann@cs.unm.edu wrote:
On Mon, 12 Feb 2007, subtleGradient / Thomas Aylott wrote:
I think TextMate should do the same thing. Start with a good deep base theme like Twilight and tweak the colors. Then save the recipe of how you tweaked that theme. The advantage is that when Twilight is updated, all of your tweaked themes based off of it are also updated since they're just recipes instead of actually different themes. And you can make really creative new versions of themes without having to do all the work of figuring out all the crazy edge cases and junk.
While this is a very good suggestion, it is certainly hindered by the fact that there is no comprehensive deep theme at the moment. E.g. the Brilliance themes are indeed well loaded with goodies, but they contain little in the way of coloring for OCaml constructs: nothing for modules, method calls, variant types, floating point numbers and operators, and so on -- these aren't even edge cases, they're core parts of the language, and I'm not sure their addition could be considered "tweaking". Now, I do 90% of my coding in OCaml, so this is what I've noticed, but I'd guess that there are other less-common languages in the bundles that are similarly unsupported by these deep themes.
This is, of course, fully understandible. If you don't code in OCaml, how the heck are you going to know what bits to add and highlight. That's why I haven't added anything for, say, HTML or CSS to any of my themes, because I touch a CSS file maybe four times a year. I wouldn't know what's missing in the theme...
So, what am I saying here? I suppose it's that if this idea of starting with a deep theme and tweaking is to get off the ground, we should probably put together an actual deep theme that has better coverage. Or something along those lines. Now, I'd be happy to add my bits to some reference theme that the other, existing themes can be retrofitted to match. I'm just wondering what the best way to do this is -- should we use one of the Brilliance themes and add to it (a Brilliance Reference if you will)? Or is there a better way? Does anyone have any good suggestions here?
William D. Neumann
"There's just so many extra children, we could just feed the children to these tigers. We don't need them, we're not doing anything with them.
Tigers are noble and sleek; children are loud and messy."
-- Neko CaseLife is unfair. Kill yourself or get over it. -- Black Box Recorder
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