Themes and colours

A theme colours both the text and the whole window: menus, tabs, panels and the status bar. Ettin Edit comes with nine:

Pick one from the Theme menu, where they're listed under Dark and Light. The change is immediate and remembered.

Themes are files

Every theme, built-in ones included, is a TextMate .tmTheme file in the themes folder:

• Linux: ~/.config/EttinEdit/themes/
• Windows: %APPDATA%\EttinEdit\themes\

Theme > Open Themes Folder opens it. This means you can:

• Change a built-in theme by editing its file, then choosing Theme > Reload Themes.
• Add a theme by dropping any .tmTheme file into the folder and reloading. Themes you add appear under Custom in the Theme menu. Thousands of .tmTheme files exist for TextMate, Sublime Text and other editors.
• Share a theme by sending someone the file.

When Ettin Edit is updated, built-in themes you haven't edited are updated with it; ones you have edited are left alone. Theme > Restore Built-in Themes puts the original built-in themes back and keeps each edited copy as <name>.tmTheme.bak, so nothing is lost.

Edit Theme Colours

Theme > Edit Theme Colours… changes a theme without touching its file by hand. Every change shows in the editor at once, so you can see what you're doing.

• Theme at the top picks the theme to edit (and switches to it).
• Editor colours: the Background, Text, Caret, Selection, Current line, Line numbers, Indent guides, Whitespace symbols, Search matches, and the Accent used for the current tab, buttons and fold markers. Click a colour to change it, or Don't set this colour to fall back to the default.
• Syntax colours are a list of rules. Each rule has a name, a Scope that says which text it colours, a colour, and B, I and U for bold, italic and underline. Type in Find to look for a rule, such as string or comment. Add Rule adds one, and the button at the end of a rule deletes it.
• Save writes the changes to the theme's file. Save As New Theme… saves them as a new theme with a name you choose, leaving the original alone. Discard Changes goes back to the theme as it was saved, and closing the window without saving does the same.

Scopes

Languages label each piece of text with a scope, such as comment.line.double-slash.rust or string.quoted.double.json. A rule's scope colours every piece of text whose scope starts with it, so string colours every kind of string in every language, and string.quoted.double.json only colours double-quoted strings in JSON. The most specific rule wins. Separate several scopes with commas.

The scopes most themes set are comment, string, constant.numeric, constant.language, keyword, storage, entity.name.function, entity.name.type, variable, support.function and invalid. See Languages for the scopes your own languages use.

Fonts

The editor's font and size are in Preferences, not in the theme, so they stay the same whichever theme you pick.