Vibrant Ink for IDEA

Published 25 March 08 04:50 AM | andersnoras 

I’m not sure if its because Java developers have a flurry of good IDEs to choose from, but IDE pimping is a rare hobby among Java developers. However, since I’m a polyglot developing stuff in a range of languages I enjoy having a familiar, nice look and feel across all the tools I use. When I swapped my Windows for a Mac, I instantly fell in love with TextMate’s celebrated Vibrant Ink theme. (Fun fact: This blog post is written in TextMate, using Vibrant Ink). I use John Lam’s port of the theme with Visual Studio, but whenever I wrote Java code I was left out in the cold with IntelliJ IDEAs plain old black, blue, red and green on white theme. As you can imagine, this was unbearable for someone used to using tricked out OSes and development tools, so I had to create a port myself.

Virbant 1

Volia! Here is the Vibrant Ink theme for IDEA in glorious technicolor. The above screenshot showcases the various features, and (luckily) regular code seldom gets this colorful.

Vibrant 2

If you fancy pimping your IDEA with a touch of cool, you can grab a jar file with my color scheme from “Is your IDE Hot or Not?” or directly from here.

Gansta! Yo’ve gots ta git this themizzle, it tha real shiznits.
Snoop Doggy Dog

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Comments

# Scott said on March 26, 2008 8:58 AM:

Stupid question.  How do you install, just drop it in the plugins folder?

# andersnoras said on March 26, 2008 11:41 AM:

@Scott;

That's not a stupid question at all - in fact I spent some time figuring out how to export them in the first place. All you need to do is go to the "Import Settings..." item on the "File" menu, choose the "VibrantInk.jar" file and follow the on screen instructions. Good luck and I hope you'll enjoy the theme.

# Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen said on March 26, 2008 3:43 PM:

Here's an Eclipse-version :)

http://blog.codefront.net/2006/09/28/vibrant-ink-textmate-theme-for-eclipse/

# Scott said on March 28, 2008 5:05 AM:

Yep!  I love the theme.  Good Job!

# Richard Osbaldeston said on March 28, 2008 9:24 AM:

Have much fun trying to set a dark gutter color with IDEA? flaky beast keeps resetting mine. Also end up with a few reversed prompts in IDEA dialogs for some bizzare reason, guess the IDEA guys don't do dark themes.

I created myself a Monokai like theme for IDEA - although it has drifted from the default over the last few weeks as my moods change: http://img250.imageshack.us/img250/3106/ideamonokaiishsy0.png

Why don't you just drop the <theme>.xml file into the config/colors folder? thats all I really do syncing up my home & work machines.

# andersnoras said on April 1, 2008 5:33 AM:

@Richard;

I'm experiencing problems with the gutter color on Windows, but not on my Mac. Your Monokai theme was nice, but a bit to candy-like for me.

# Turkey said on July 30, 2008 11:05 PM:

Thanx You.. Perfect Docs

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