[TxMt] The Growing Importance of Themes

[David Powers]

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 at 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 Case
>
> Life is unfair.  Kill yourself or get over it.
>         -- Black Box Recorder
>
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