Eclipse's Package explorer background color follows windows theme. I want to change the color without changing windows' theme. Possible?

eclipse windows-xp themes windows-themes
navand picture navand · Oct 5, 2010 · Viewed 38.7k times · Source

Maybe a way to alter the colors locally (as in application dependant)?

A background color of eclipse is white, the same white of windows' active window background color. If I change the color on the theme, eclipse changes to the color.

I want to change this software's color without changing the whole theme (because then every program gets weird colors). Is this possible? I thought that maybe there was a way to apply different windows themes to different programs, or something.

I'm using windows XP, classic windows theme.

Answer

Mihai Nita picture Mihai Nita · Jan 18, 2013

Install the "Eclipse 4 Chrome Theme" from http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/eclipse-4-chrome-theme

Then you can customize a lot of the Eclipse UI widgets. But not what you want, at least not out of the box. For that you should go to the CSS tab (in Eclipse 4 Chrome Theme) and paste this:

Tree, List, Table {
  background-color: #202020;
  color: #d0d0d0;
}

You can change almost anything, the problem is finding out what, and the fact that some things are bitmaps that you can't change (so if the bitmap is dark and you set a dark background you will "loose" the bitmap)

This list of widgets might help, http://download.eclipse.org/rt/rap/doc/1.5/help/html/reference/theming/index.html but they give you generic info on the widget names, not the Eclipse info (with IDs and all), so be careful :-)

== Very late addition ==

Everything you need in one place, including links to a custom dark theme: http://mihai-nita.net/2013/09/19/dark-eclipse/

Mac Screen Shot Example as of Sept 2013 (please be sure to restart Eclipse after changing file):

enter image description here

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