Dark Theme for Geany IDE
by admin on Nov.28, 2008, under Eye Candy, Geany, Themes
While many people (and applications) choose bright themes for their desktop environments, my eyes sometimes feel very strained after a long day work on such a bright theme. The reason is simple: my eyes are capturing lots of light for an extended period of time, and this causes a lot of fatigueness.
After a while, I tried working on darker themes and it in fact solved most of my problems. So I usually switch between bright and dark themes depending on how much work I’m going to do.
Geany with the dark theme
This being said, I also use Geany Integrated Development Environment (IDE) often when I need to use mouse frequently. However, the original Geany comes only with a bright theme. I looked around and there was one other project creating a dark scheme for geany which I found interesting. However, it didn’t supported the programming languages and file-types I usually use. Also, its color theme was not matching my dark theme.
So I made a new dark theme for Geany which you can find it here. It supports the following file-types:
- C files
- Configuration files (.conf)
- C++ files
- Cascading Style Sheet files
- HTML files
- Java files
- JavaScript files
- LaTeX files
- Make files
- PHP files
- Python files
- XML files
- Any other file not supported by Geany (.common)
Of course this set of file-types is not complete compared to what Geany already supports, but these were the ones I frequently use. So if you need other file-types, or in general have any comment or feedback, please leave a comment and I will try to see what I can do about it.
Download:
You can download the it from here:
- Download version 0.1: geany-dark-theme-0.1.tar.gz
Installation:
Just copy the content of the tar file to Geany’s directory inside your home path at: /home/YourUserName/.geany/filedefs/ .
Note that the filetypes.common included in this package, will have an effect on how other file-types which are not supported by this package will be rendered. If this is annoying for your work, simply delete or rename it to something else to regain the original look of Geany for other files.
Uninstallation: Simply delete files from your /home/YourUserName/.geany/filedefs/ to restore the original Geany theme. (Thanks for Ben for suggesting this.)
Screenshots:
Editing a Python file, click for larger version.
Editing a C++ file.
License:
The license is the same as Geany’s (GPL).
December 19th, 2008 on 8:43 am
hmmmmmmm, seems to work fine in the actual area of text, but I’m not getting the toolbars to change color like in your screen shots.
http://triton.imageshack.us/Himg249/scaled.php?server=249&filename=screenshot1ln8.png&xsize=1280&ysize=800
December 28th, 2008 on 8:52 am
Very nice. I agree with you about the bright themes. They really hurt my eyes. Anyway does this theme support the ruby file type? Thank you.
December 29th, 2008 on 11:30 pm
Hi Nick,
For getting dark themes in all places you need to change your GTK theme. Simply download a dark GTK theme (for example from http://www.gnome-look.org) and extract the package to your .themes directory in your home directory. Then change the GTK theme from Preferences>Appearance.
December 29th, 2008 on 11:32 pm
Hi Dushyanth,
Well I’ve not used Ruby for programming, so I didn’t include it in the package, but will try to add a suitable one in next release.
January 3rd, 2009 on 4:46 pm
I was thinking about writing a plug-in for geany that could do just what you did for you, so that it was faster and safer, and easier. I have another dark theme that I found online some time ago that fails with inline javascript in html… does yours have this issue (dark code on a dark background)? If I were to make a plug-in, would you mind if I used your code as one of the default templates? Thanks!
January 3rd, 2009 on 5:47 pm
Hi Drew,
As far as I know, it shows it correctly, only the JS keywords are in red which might not be that great. Please also test it yourself and let me know what you think, I can easily change it to whatever renders better.
And of course, I would be happy to see this theme used in your package.
Cheers
January 6th, 2009 on 6:05 pm
How to change the color used by Geany to mark text?
January 7th, 2009 on 9:23 pm
Hi Kabus,
Do you mean the color when you select a portion of text?
You can check the filetypes.common file, look for selection section, the first is the background color when selection happens and the next is the foreground color.
January 18th, 2009 on 10:47 pm
Hey,
Like your theme. I do a lot of work with Bash scripts and R files. I’ve made a filedef for each type based on your theme. You’re welcome to add them to your next release. Please edit them as you see fit.
http://cross-lfs.org/~arowland/shared_files/filetypes.r
http://cross-lfs.org/~arowland/shared_files/filetypes.sh
January 19th, 2009 on 12:30 am
Hey,
Thanks for the R and bash script filedefs, I will add them for the next release.
Cheers
March 12th, 2009 on 10:44 am
no vhdl support
April 11th, 2009 on 6:34 pm
What GTK theme are you using?
April 12th, 2009 on 9:46 am
Morghan, the GTK theme is Mire V2 from gnome-look.org.
Cheers