Hi,
I was coding on my 'duino today and i thought man the IDE is so boring
I wish there was a way to customize the fonts through GUI, not through the Preferences.txt.
and also I wish there were a lot of themes available. The original blue-orange theme is so boring.
So yeah, i wish the IDE was a bit for fancy and fun than it is now.
Thanks!
If you're worried about the IDE being boring, it simply means you are not creating projects that are challenging enough. If I have a sophisticated project going, I'm not aware of the GUI and don't even see the GUI; I'm 100% immersed in the code.
PocketHarambe101:
I wish there were a lot of themes available
Here's 5 different themes that I updated to work with the new versions of the Arduino IDE:
Another couple:
You can probably find others. Some won't work with newer/older IDE versions because of changes but they're easy to fix, you just need to convert some button files to vector or raster format and maybe add a couple of settings to theme.txt/default.xml, just use the stock Arduino theme as a guide. I set mine up to be compatible with the full range of IDE versions.
It's fairly easy to make your own. The only thing you have to be careful of is making sure there is enough contrast between text and background colors. I put together a library/example sketch for testing which includes a bunch of information on what all the theme properties do:
I'm fine with the default theme but I do frequently see where people have accessibility issues that can be solved by changing the theme. Those users would benefit from being able to configure the theme via the GUI. Changing the theme now is unnecessarily complicated because the Arduino developers have provided absolutely no documentation for the theme system. There's this syntax/default.xml file that has tons of settings that don't appear to do anything at all. There's a couple of other settings in preferences.txt. You have to restart the IDE over and over to see the effects of your changes. The theme files are stored in the IDE installation folder and so all changes will need to be redone every time you update the IDE.
If you feel like you need to fool around with the theme just to make the IDE more fun none of those issues should really be a problem for you so have at it. If you find anything that I've missed in my documentation in the ThemeTest README.md file then let me know and I'll add it.