[TxMt] The Growing Importance of Themes
subtleGradient / Thomas Aylott
oblivious at subtlegradient.com
Mon Feb 12 16:44:13 UTC 2007
The current situation
A major goal of all the scoping standardizationstuff we do in the
syntaxes is to make it really easy so make a single theme that can be
used for any language.
Unfortunately, the reality is that languages are really complex and
it takes work to make a theme look good in more than a few languages.
And then more work to keep that theme looking good as the languages
syntaxes are updated and improved.
So, what do we have?
We have a handful of deep themes and a whole hugh mess of really good
looking shallow themes.
the deep themes are constantly updated and work in most every
language. The shallow themes are usually never updated and only work
in a few languages and break on most edge cases like deeply nested
embedded source.
The future
Themes are going to be even more important in the next major release
of TextMate. Themes will be more than just style, they will really
start making inroads into real functionality.
We'll be able to color things like the current selection, the current
line, merge conflicts, tab triggers, placeholders, etc... probably
even more.
[see http://pastie.textmate.org/39665]
This means that themes are going to become much more important to the
way you use the application than ever before.
Which means that it's going to become that much more difficult to
make a theme that really works for more than a few people and keep it
updated.
Tweaked Theme Versions instead of new Themes!
I think we need to move away from a Theme-as-style type of mentality
and more to a Theme-as-functionality type of thinking.
I've put a lot of work into my Brilliance Black theme, but frankly a
lot of people think it's really ugly.
Why is it so ugly? Mostly just my color choices. People all have
different tastes.
Also, it's totally unusable on a dark CRT or LCD.
I've made a few versions of my Brilliance Black theme. Brilliance
Dull, Brilliance White, Brilliance BBS, etc…
The advantage of doing a version of an existing deep theme is that
you get a new style without having to do all the coding of the random
edge cases. It looks pretty without losing any theme-based
functionality.
ShapeShifter
Have you ever user ShapeShifter? There are all these OS themes that
you can use to change the look of the chrome on all the windows and
dock and whatever else on your system. There's also a new tool you
can use to make a tweaked version of an existing theme. You can apply
core image tweaks to all of the images in the theme and save out a
tweaked version of a theme.
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.
thomas Aylott — subtleGradient — CrazyEgg — sixteenColors
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