Is there a way to have a dark theme in Netbeans?
Darcula
UPDATE 2016-02: NetBeans 8 now has a Darcula plugin, better and more complete than the alternatives discussed in old version of this Answer.
The attractive and productive Darcula theme in JetBrains IntelliJ is now available in NetBeans 8.0 & 8.1!
The Real Thing
This plugin provides the real Darcula, not an imitation.
Konstantin Bulenkov of the JetBrains company open-sourced the Darcula look-and-feel originally built for the IntelliJ IDE. This NetBeans plugin discussed here wraps that original implementation, adapting it to NetBeans. So we see close fidelity to the original Darcula. [By the way, there are many other reasons beyond Darcula to use IntelliJ – both IntelliJ and NetBeans are truly excellent and amazing products.]
This NetBeans plugin is itself open-source as well.
Installation
Comes in two parts:
A plugin
A Fonts & Colors profile
Plugin
The plugin Darcula LAF for NetBeans is easily available through the usual directory within NetBeans.
Choose Tools > Plugins. On the Available Plugins tab, scroll or search for "Darcula LAF for NetBeans". As per usual, check the checkbox and click the Install button. Restart NetBeans.
Profile
In NetBeans > Preferences > Fonts & Colors (tab) > Profile (popup menu), choose the new Darcula item.
Click the Apply button.
I suggest also hitting Duplicate in case you ever make any modifications (discussed below).
Fix overly-bright background colors
You may find the background color of lines of code may be too bright such as lines marked with a breakpoint, or the currently executing line in the debugger. These are categories listed on the Annotations tab of the Fonts & Colors tab.
Of course you can change the background color of each Category manually but that is tedious.
Workaround: Click the Restore button found to the right of the Profile name. Double-check to make sure you have Darcula as the selected Profile of course. Then click the Apply and OK buttons at the bottom.
Font
You may want to change the font in the method editor. I most highly recommend the commercial font for programmers, PragmataPro. For a free-of-cost and open-source font, the best is Hack. Hack was built on the very successful DejaVu font which in turn was built on Bitstream Vera.
To change the font, add these steps to the above to duplicate the profile as a backup before making your modification:
Click the Duplicate button.
Save the duplicate with a different name such as appending your name.Example: “Darcula - Juliette”.
Click the Apply button.
While in that same Fonts & Colors tab, select Default in the Category list and hit the … button to choose a font.
You might also want to change the font seen in the Output and the Terminal panes. From that Fonts & Colors tab, switch to the sibling tab Miscellaneous. Then see both the Output tab and the Terminal tab.
Experience So Far
While still new I am reserving final judgement on Darcula. So far, so good. Already the makers have had a few updates fixing a few glitches, so that is good to see. This seems to be a very thorough product. As a plugin this affects the entire user interface of NetBeans; that can be very tricky to get right.
There was a similar plugin product predating Darcula: the “Dark Look And Feel Themes” plugin. While I was grateful to use that for a while, I am much happier with Darcula. That other one was more clunky and I had to spend much time tweaking colors of “Norway Today” to work together. Also, that plugin was not savvy with Mac OS X menus so the main Mac menu bar was nearly empty while NetBeans’ own menu bar was embedded within the window. The Darcula plugin has no such problem; the Mac menu bar appears normally.
The rest of this Answer is left intact for history, and for alternatives if Darcula proves problematic.
NetBeans 8 – Dark Editor
At least in NetBeans 8.0, two dark profiles are now built-in. Profile names:
Norway Today
City Lights
The profiles affect only the code editing pane, not the entire NetBeans user-interface. That should mean much less risk of side-effects and bugs than a plugin.
Norway Today
City Lights
Tip: You can alter the font in either theme, while preserving the other aspects. Perhaps Menlo on a Mac, or its parent DejaVu. Or my fav, the commercial font Pragmata.
Unfortunately, neither theme suits my eyes. They do not begin to compare to the excellent Darcula theme in JetBrains IntelliJ.
Choose Profile in Font Settings
On a Mac, the menu path is Netbeans > Preferences > Fonts & Colors (tab) > Profile (popup menu).
On other host operating systems, the menu path may be Tools > Options > Fonts & Colors. Not sure, but it was so in previous versions.
Netbeans 8
Tools -> Options -> Appearance (Look & Feel Tab)
(NetBeans -> Preferences -> Appearance (Look & Feel Tab) on OS X)
Netbeans 7.x
Tools -> Plugins -> Available -> Dark Look and Feel - Install this plugin.
Once this plugin is installed, restarting netbeans should automatically switch to Dark Metal.
There are 2 themes that comes with this plugin - Dark Metal & Dark Nimbus
In order to switch themes, use the below option :
Tools -> Options -> Miscellaneous -> Windows -> Preferred Look & Feel option
And then there is the original plugin ez-on-da-ice. Better yet, you can complain to me directly if there are issues. I promise you, I am mostly very responsive :).
http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/40985/ez-on-da-ice
On Mac
Netbeans 8.0.2
Tools -> Plugins -> type in search: Dark Look and Feel. Then install plugin.
NOTE: There is no "Option" Or "Appearance" in the "Tools" section in Netbeans 8.0.2.
u can use Dark theme Plugin
Tools > Plugin > Dark theme and Feel
and it is work :)
There is no more plugin in netbeans 12. In case someone comes to this page. Tools->Options->Appearance->Look and feel->Flatlaf Dark
I'm using Eclipse and I don't like the appearance of the user interface, it's to much white color in the background. I have used Eclipse earlier, and then it was better with not all that white area! I have been looking in the preference, but have not found any places to change the user interface. Is there a theme that could be changed !?
Open your Eclipse Market Place and search for "Eclipse Color Theme",install it.
than go to windows> preferences> appearances> color theme, select your favorite style, and enjoy.
For more info read hare.
In Eclipse Juno (4.2) it's possible to completely customize the look and feel of Eclipse via CSS, but doing so yourself isn't exactly trivial. You can get the "old" style theme (Indigo) easily via changing a Preference, see this question.
Here are a couple of other related SO questions and answers:
Eclipse 4 Juno themes
eclipse Juno custom workbench colors
So in eclipse whenever there is an error it's underlined in red, and when you hover over it is displays an annotation with tips on how to fix the error. On my Windows OS it is correct and the background is a tanish color but on Ubuntu the background is black and I want it tanish like Windows. I know there is an annotation area under Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors > Annotations, but I don't see a section to change background colors. Please help.
Oddly, colors and fonts are very poorly implemented in Eclipse. Quite a number of things are either extremely difficult to figure out or impossible. Looks like this one is impossible to modify. Perhaps there's an OS way to make those changes?
That said, I found an Eclipse plugin, Annotions Ruler Background. It looks like it should do the trick, but was designed for Indigo (3.7) and doesn't seem to work on Juno (4.2). Sigh.
You can install it from the usual way in Eclipse (help->eclipse marketplace->search, etc.). Their website is here.
If you're still on Indigo, give it a try.
I find this page, it works. http://ubuntu-user-tricks.blogspot.tw/2012/09/3-things-to-do-after-installing-eclipse.html
It change the theme tooltip background color, and foreground color if need.
You can install tool gnome-color-chooser or modify the configure directly (default at /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc). If After you modify the theme configure, you need reload theme to use new config.
Is there any way to completely turn Eclipse to a dark IDE?
Here's a Picture of what I'm asking:
I don't mind doing 1 hour of work to do something like this :D
EDIT:
As Konstantin Komissarchik said, I had to modify my OS colors. This is possible by adding a custom Visual Style to the Windows. With the aid of a Custom Theme and a Custom Visual Style for Windows 7 (Which I have changed a little bit), my Eclipse looks like the picture below:
Update 2019:
The latest versions of Eclipse now come with a dark theme. Just go to Window -> Preferences -> General -> Appearance -> Theme and select "Dark" or another appropriate version based on your operating system.
Of course you can still enable dark visual styles to your Windows or change your theme on other operating systems but the default dark theme is good enough for the most part.
Moonrise is the best dark theme I have ever seen for Eclipse!
Just follow the steps on the website and Enjoy!
https://github.com/guari/eclipse-ui-theme
Update August 2016:
Tejas Padliya adds in the comments:
Dark theme works well with Eclipse 4.5 onward with Windows 10.
No more black text on black background
Update June 2014:
As mentioned din "Dark Theme, Top Eclipse Luna Feature #5", Eclipse 4.4 (Luna) has a dark theme included in it (see informatik01's comment):
When Eclipse 3.0 shipped in 2004 it brought a new look to the workbench. Now, 10 years later, an entirely new Dark Theme is launching.
The theme extends to more than just the Widgets. Syntax highlighting has also been improved to take advantage of the new look.
The What's new page mentions:
A new dark window theme has been introduced. This popular community theme demonstrates the power of the underlying Eclipse 4 styling engine.
You can enable it from the General > Appearance preference page.
Plug-ins can contribute extensions to this theme to style their own specific views and editors to match the window theme.
Update April 2013:
It seems the solution below don't work well with Eclipse Juno 4.2 and Windows 8, according to Lennart in the comments.
One solution which (mostly) work is the Eclipse Chrome Theme (compatible Juno 4.2 and even Kepler 4.3), from the GitHub project eclipse-themes, by Jeeeyul Lee.
This post mentions:
The first is to change the appearance of what is inside the editor windows.
That can be done with the Eclipse Colour Theme plugin (http://eclipsecolorthemes.org/). My favourite editor theme is Vibrant Ink with the Monaco font. They explain how to install their themes very well (http://eclipsecolorthemes.org/?view=how-to-use), although you get a fine set of dark themes with the default plugin install and may not need to come back to their website for any more. Get the plugin here.
The second stage is darkening the chrome of the UI, which is all the widgets and menus and everything outside of the child window canvases.
This plugin gives you a GUI editor for the chrome colour scheme: https://github.com/jeeeyul/eclipse-themes/.
If you want a dark one, go ahead and click away until eclipse is dark.
Once you are done, some GUI surface area will show through the system theme as mentioned at the top of this post.
Rather than using that editor, you could install the pre-baked Dark Juno theme instead.
The install is manual.
Start by downloading it from here: https://github.com/eclipse-color-theme/eclipse-ui-themes.
It has to be copied into your eclipse dropins folder. This lives next to the eclipse executable, not in your workspace or someplace like that. In my case the command to do the copy was:
cp ./plugins/com.github.eclipsecolortheme.themes_1.0.0.201207121019.jar /usr/lib/eclipse/dropins/
You could be running eclipse from any directory though, so which eclipse will tell you where it should go.
Restart eclipse and you should find a Dark Juno option under Preferences::General::Appearance. It is a nice neutral grey with some gradients and is a very good option.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Update December 2012 (20 months later):
The blog post "Jin Mingjian: Eclipse Darker Theme" mentions this GitHub repo "eclipse themes - darker":
The big fun is that, the codes are minimized by using Eclipse4 platform technologies like dependency injection.
It proves that again, the concise codes and advanced features could be achieved by contributing or extending with the external form(like library, framework).
New language is not necessary just for this kind of purpose.
Update July 2012 (15 months later):
I have seen one! (Ie, a fully dark theme for Eclipse), as reported by Lars Vogel in "Eclipse 4 is beautiful – Create your own Eclipse 4 theme":
If you want to play with it, you only need to write a plug-in, create a CSS file and use the org.eclipse.e4.ui.css.swt.theme extension point to point to your file.
If you export your plug-in, place it in the “dropins” folder of your Eclipse installation and your styling is available.
pixeldude mentions in the comments having publish "Dark Juno" on GitHub!
Komododave mentions that you don't always need a plugin: see "Ubuntu + Eclipse 4.2 - Dark theme - How to darken sidebar backgrounds?" for an example, based on gtkrc resource.
Original answer: March 2011
Note that a full dark theme will be possible with e4.
(see dynamic css with e4 or A week at e4 – Themeing in e4):
In the meantime, only for editors though (which isn't what you want but still merit to be mentioned):
www.eclipsecolorthemes.org:
"Fresh up your Eclipse with super-awesome color themes!"
UPDATE 2: A fork of this plugin has been merged with the main Eclipse Platform. You should find it pre-installed in the future Eclipse releases ;)
UPDATE: I released a new version, it's a little bit darker, now pretty everything that can be currently modified has been aligned to the theme colors. Have fun!
Here is a screenshot:
if you may like, I uploaded on github a dark theme I made some months ago to avoid blinding my eyes when spending many hours on the editor.. I made it because with all the others themes some Eclipse parts remains ugly and unstyled.
You can find it here: http://guari.github.io/eclipse-ui-theme/
With my Eclipse configurations works quite ok, if you'll find some elements that remains unstyled you can submit an issue or suggest a change and I'll try to correct it if it's possible ;) (remind that currently, CSS styling support in Eclipse it's uncomplete and sometimes buggy..)
There is a completely new, free plugin which is really DARK, supports Retina and has beautiful icons.
What is most important: It doesn't suck on WINDOWS! It doesn't have white scrollbars and other artifacts. It's really dark.
You'll find it there:
https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/darkest-dark-theme
This is how it looks like on Windows 10 with Retina screen:
Here is my Black Eclipse Custom CSS for Chrome Theme Plugin. Usable with eclipse 4.2 and 4.3. Main goal was to make it look nice in ubuntu, besides making it "darker".
Caution: May or may not work on Windows Systems, only checked with ubuntu.
Required: Chrome Theme and Color Theme plugin
Install those mentioned plugins. They can be found in the eclipse marketplace.
Install my variant of Gedit Oblivion Theme in Color Theme and activate it. (http://eclipsecolorthemes.org/?view=theme&id=12544)
Insert the custom css in css editor of Chrome Theme. I spend several hours with CSS Spy to find out all the relevant information to make eclipse as black and this file as small as possible. There is also an .epf File for the Chrome Theme plugin preferences you should import.
You can get it from my dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ye5tosl3cjhx96d/yL-_Y5j1PE
In the end your eclipse will look like this:
Have Fun!
Help → Install New Software.
Enter Eclipse Color Theme Plugin URL: http://eclipse-color-theme.github.com/update
Install Eclipse Color Theme Plugin.
Restart Eclipse.
Goto Window → Preferences → General → Appearance → Color Theme
I like the Havenjark default Color Theme. Eclipse Color Theme Plugin comes loaded with 24 default Color Themes and option to Import a theme.
Install a newer version of Eclipse, (Luna Release (4.4.0) or more recent), it include a great Dark theme by default.
Here is a screenshot :
Eclipse uses native OS controls for most UI aspects (buttons, menus, lists, etc.). That's where colors for most of the IDE come from. The first step in making a "dark IDE" is to modify your OS color theme. Then you can add the color themes plugin to complete the look.
Its Simple.just Download this file DarkJuno Theme.Then Extract the rar file and copy com.github.eclipsecolortheme.themes_1.0.0.201207121019.jar file to /yourEclipsHome/dropins.
Then restart Eclips and go to window/preference/General/Appearance.In there choose Dark Juno theme on Dropdown. Thats it. Restart Your Eclips.
For More Info watch this video tutorial
If the purpose of a dark theme is to make your eyes comfortable, you can enable High Contrast settings of your Operating System. For example in Windows 8.1 you can turn on - off High Contrast by pressing ALT + left SHIFT + PRINT SCREEN
This will make entire OS in dark mode, not only eclipse. Below is a sample screenshot of Eclipse with High Contrast enabled
If you are in ubuntu 12+ get compiz settings manager, in accessibility enable negative, set the shortcuts. The default is super+n. Now make eclipse be in focus and press the super+n or the key you set it as. This will apply negative filter on eclipse.
I've build a win 7 dark theme base on the popular windows 7 'concave 7' theme for eclipse dark juno theme.
And I also create a dark theme inspired from the editor color theme 'Zenburn' created by Janni Nurmin
Here are photos of this theme:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/114921213517944089128/albums/5952793008016527457
All settings of this theme is available on github:
https://github.com/youjenli/dark-theme-for-win7-eclipse
And feedback and suggestion is appreciated, thank you!
For a Visual Studio 2013 Dark Theme:
Combine this preferences file from eclipsecolorthemes.org (an .epf) with the built-in dark theme from Eclipse Luna. I was able to do so with the following steps:
Window > General > Appearance > Theme: Dark.
File > Import > General > Preferences > Browse: theme-25999.epf > Finish.
An example search for more VS Dark Themes on eclipsecolorthemes.org
I've spent few hours looking for a nice solution to make my eclipse UI dark, and I have finally found a way to do it. I am using Fedora 18 and Eclipse for PHP Developers (PDT v3.0.2).
The nicest solution is to download DeLorean Dark Theme then enabling it in Gnome Shell.
Installation procedure:
Download DeLorean-Dark-Theme-3.6 vs.2.56 from http://browse.deviantart.com/art/DeLorean-Dark-Theme-3-6-vs-2-56-328859335
Unzip the archive, and copy the delorean-dark-theme-3.6 folder to /usr/share/themes/
Open Gnome Tweak Tool Enable the freshly installed theme from Theme > Gtk+ Theme (If gnome-tweak-tool isn't installed, install it using yum install gnome-tweak-tool, then F2 or launch it from the terminal)
Reload Gnome Shell by hitting F2, then typing 'r'
Open Eclipse PDT and enjoy the new look
I highly recommend to pick one of the nice code coloring themes from eclipsecolorthemes [DOT] org I am using a custom version of the Oblivion theme by Roger Dudler
Here is what it looks like: http://i.stack.imgur.com/Xx7m6.png
This procedure is for Eclipse PHP and Aptana 3. If you are using Eclipse 4 and higher, I recommend DeLorean Dark Theme for eclipse: http:// goo [DOT] gl/wkjj8
There is pretty simple and easy solution to this problem) Just few simple steps that will transform your ugly Eclipse into fully darked beast)
example of full darked Eclipse
No heavy work or manually editing files required!
At least this works with the last Eclipse (Mars 2) on Ubuntu 14.04 (though i think such process should work on all OS's)
So:
Download some dark GTK theme
for example, you can grab few from http://www.noobslab.com/
To apply your newly installed theme you will need Unity tweak tool
sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool
sudo apt-get install unity-webapps-service
Launch Unity tweak - Appearance - Theme - apply your dark theme
Open Eclipse; in preferences choose GTK theme
In Eclipse, open Marketplace and install Color Theme - you will be able to change editor background and highlight colors to match your dark theme
Close Eclipse
Go to Eclipe folder:
../Eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.ui.themes_WHATEVER_NUMBER_HERE/
in that folder rename or delete 'css' folder
Open and enjoy fully darked Eclipse!
PS: install a few dark themes and try which will suit you more
Instead if finding a night theme I found a utility that puts my entire desktop into night mode NegativeScreen.
I use the below adjusted 'Smart Inversion Alt 2' matrix where the black is lightened a little.
Smart Inversion Alt 2b (danielsokolowski)=
{ 0.390, -0.620, -0.620, 0.000, 0.000 }
{ -1.210, -0.220, -1.220, 0.000, 0.000 }
{ -0.160, -0.160, 0.840, 0.000, 0.000 }
{ 0.075, 0.075, 0.075, 1.000, 0.000 }
{ 1, 1, 1, 0.000, 1.000 }
There's a new plugin which provides full theming for Eclipse:
http://brainwy.github.io/liclipse/
It's integrated with Eclipse Color Theme so that when a new theme is selected in preferences > general > appearance > color theme, the proper background is also applied to other parts of the IDE (theming everything or just views which are previously registered according to a combo in that same page).
And besides theming it provides a bunch of other things :)
You can use this great theme from above and add predefined theme only for editor from this site:
http://eclipsecolorthemes.org/
(I use guari and retta and I think that looks real good :)
I hope that it will help someone :)
Darkest Dark is the best dark theme.
It also comes with different toolbar icon shapes. Here's the link :
https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/darkest-dark-theme
Hope you like it.
Windows 10 users
If you want to get a custom window title color on Windows 10, in short going from this
to this (or any other custom color for the window of your Eclipse IDE)
follow the next steps.
Go to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\. Duplicate the folder aero and the file aero.theme. If you can't duplicate the folder and the file then right click on both, Properties, Security, Modify, add your user to Permissions, and set authorizations to modify, read and write.
Rename the folder C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\aero - copy and the file C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\aero - copy.theme to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\custom and C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\custom.theme (you can pick the name you want).
Rename C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\custom\aero.msstyles to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\custom.msstyles.
Rename C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\custom\%your_locale%\aero.msstyles.mui (%your_locale% is fr-FR in my case) to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\custom\%your_locale%\custom.msstyles.mui.
Edit custom.theme with Notepad and change the PATH variable of VisualStyles to your custom.msstyles.
Set your custom theme (yet unchanged) by double-clicking on custom.theme. Then right-click on start menu button, go to Parameters -> Customize appearance -> Themes and select the second one. Go to the menu Colors, select dark mode for every applications. Choose custom color for accent color and put it full black.
Apply your favorite dark theme (here DevStyle - Darkest dark - Deep black) to Eclipse and voilà, you have a full dark theme for Eclipse on Windows 10!
For Mac,
Eclipse > Preferences > Appearance > Theme