This was a bet – so take it for what it is – me being a geek that can’t back down from a challenge. A friend of mine really likes my VibrantInk theme for VisualStudio and he was lamenting the way RadRails (Aptana’s Eclipse-based IDE for Rails) looks and wished he had this theme (which, in turn, is based on TextMate’s Blackboard theme). He bet me some money – and I’m a sucker. Either way I know a lot of the peeps out there work with multiple platforms and if you have to – well at least do it in style!
Anyway – I downloaded RadRails and kicked it up over the weekend and took his challenge! Here’s what I came up with:
I know there’s another one out there – but it’s really old and looks like … not so good. Anyway you’ll note that I can’t approximate too closely here – I couldn’t find the keyword for the method names and the bolding for the editor looks whacky, so ClearType isn’t quite as clear.
Here’s the HTML editor, which is left alone:
Here’s what I changed:
- Changed the font to Consolas
- Remove the pesky spellchecker which clouds up the page with weird “warnings” about code that’s “misspelled”
- Remove scope-based variable highlighting
- Do my best to approximate the BlackBoard theme for TextMate (even though I called it VibrantInk – there’s some confusion and… whatever)
- Turn off code folding
- A smattering of tweaks and touches.
I don’t think I’ll win the bet since it doesn’t match *exactly* – but it’s not my fault! I can’t get the method names to highlight! They should be a nice light-orangey color so if you know how to do it – help me win my bet won’t you!
You can download the theme here.
To install it, open up RadRails and go to File/Import. Select the file and walkthrough the defaults – this should set your IDE.
If you want to uninstall it – right-click on the Ruby editor (with a Ruby page open) and select “Preferences” – a page will pop up and then you can select “Restore Defaults” – this will reset your action. All other methods seem to have failed for me at least.
