[TxMt] The Growing Importance of Themes

[subtleGradient / Thomas Aylott]

On Feb 12, 2007, at 1:33 PM, William D. Neumann 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

That is exactly my point.
We need a single theme that works in all languages and then multiple  
style version of that theme.

The original intent of Brilliance Black was to be a theme that looked  
good in every language.
It is now my goal to make Brilliance Black a deep base theme and to  
make multiple stylistic versions of it.
Maybe I'll make a real Brilliance Reference theme too and then make  
brilliance black the first version of that theme.

Give me a few reference OCAML files and I'll do my best to make it  
look good with Brilliance Black.
I have no clue what OCAML is at this point.

thomas Aylott — subtleGradient — CrazyEgg — sixteenColors

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