[TxMt] Theme creation tools, wishlist

[Daniel Käsmayr]

Aloha Soryu,

> did you check out the [brilliant themes][1] by Thomas Aylott?
> They are a nice starting point for theming (as intended by Thomas).

That's what I am using for a start (Brilliance Black). I just got  
confused by Allan's comment on the cool highlighting for mails since  
BB does not really color quotes in emails. Nevertheless are Thomas's  
themes by far the most complete out there -- its just that it seems  
so difficult to create a theme that works for all; scope names etc.  
are very different, can always change and somehow it seems every user  
of Textmate has different requirements making it very difficult to  
start such a thing at all; Kudos to Thomas for actually making these  
“omnipotent” themes.


> As for
>
>> * extract a listing of scopes from a bundle
>> * (and possibly some way to easily change a *whole theme's  
>> colors*: like convert all R values to G values… ;))
>
> This could be done with some shell commands I think. You could try  
> to make a theme editor that works independent of TextMate, also :)  
> the themes are `XML Property List` files so parsing and generating  
> should be no problem at all.

1. Shell script: I guess so, it would probably be quite easy for  
someone speaking perl… ;)
but:
2. it would be great to have that theme editor. I have seen that the  
file format for themes is very open and accessible; it should not be  
that difficult to hack some lines of a Cocoa app together to do this,  
I guess, at which point the shell script from 1. will come in handy.

> I bet your Wish list is not really of high priority to Allan (and  
> others waiting for certain features). Sorry, I don't mean to  
> discourage you…

I know ;) But I can wish -- or give some programmer/hacker here some  
ideas and lust for rolling their own. I would love to do it myself,  
but then there is more important work to do. Talk to me again in  
August/September… although I do have a list of some apps now that I  
would love to write… mh.

Dan