How to change Netbeans to a darker "theme" - is there a substitute for Substance module?

[Thomas Wolf]

I like dark backgrounds with light foreground colors. So I use the "City Lights" profile (with some changes to make it less garish to me). This takes care of the NB editor. But how about the rest of NB? I know of no way of customizing this in a similar way - except to use an L&F such as Substance. There used to be a nice module to make it easy to integrate with NB:
https://substance-netbeans.dev.java.net/
But according to the web site, development and maintainance of this module has been discontinued. Is there another, easy way of achieving what I want? Netbeans should work by giving Substance as the --laf argument, but reading the above site, there were a couple things the module did to make everything look "right" in NB.

thnx for any info,
tom

[Fabrizio Giudici]

Thomas Wolf wrote:

[Thomas Wolf]

I use Nimbus, but I have no idea how I would customize it - and only for Netbeans.

There should really be more customizability of colors directly in Netbeans. I mean how difficult would it be to provide a dialog that allows you to select the colors used for the various windows and then save this info for subsequent invocations? I have no clue, as I don't know the NB code, but they already have this kind of dialog for the editor - wouldn't there be *some* reuse?

NB devs - could you keep this in mind for 6.6 or 7.0? Should I write an enhancement issue or is there one for this already? I can't find anything in bugzilla (but that's not surprising - i never find anything with my searches


Thanks,
tom

p.s. I did find one issue: http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=91614
but it's pretty high-level regarding L&F support - dont think it addresses my specific concern.



Fabrizio Giudici wrote:

[Fabrizio Giudici]

Thomas Wolf wrote:

[Thomas Wolf]

I created an enhancement bug for this: http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=151069

Please vote for it it, if you feel like you should be able to customize NB window colors.
tom



Fabrizio Giudici wrote:

[kristian]

You can try this: http://www.mediabits.dk/php/netbeans-the-dark-side/ - It is based on Metal, and not perfect.. but it does give you a nice dark background.

[Thomas Wolf]

Thanks Kristian.
I gave it a try and it works pretty well. The only caveat is the same as I had when I used to try various dark themes with "Substance" a couple years ago: it seemed to slow the IDE down a little (painting). So, I'm not sure I'll stick with it.

But thanks again anyhow.
tom


kristian wrote:

[Marcelo Ruiz]

Hi all!

As many of you, I've been trying to get NetBeans 6.5 to work with a Dark Theme for a while, until I finally found this:

http://personales.ya.com/nimrod/faq-en.html

I created then my own Dark Theme . It's far from being perfect, but I think it looks quite good.

I'm attaching a Zip file with the contents of what you need in case you want to try it.

In windows XP with Java SE6 installed just follow these 5 simple steps:

1 - Copy nimrodlf.j16.jar into your %ProgramFiles%/NetBeans 6.5/platform9/lib folder.

2 - Copy MarceloDark.theme into your %ProgramFiles%NetBeans 6.5 folder.

3 - Append in netbeans_default_options of your %ProgramFiles%NetBeans 6.5/etc/netbeans.conf what is in the file "ToAddInNetBeansConf.txt"

4 - Copy the folder "Java Marcelo's Dark" into your %Documents&Settings%\.netbeans\6.5\config\Editors\FontsColors folder.

5 - Start NetBeans and go to Tools->Options->Fonts and Colors and select "Java Marcelo's Dark" to be the active profile.

That's it!

Note: My fonts & colors profile was created to work with java code, but if you're not, you can customize it (mine is based on the profile "Ruby Dark Pastels").

If you try it, let me know what you think of it... maybe we can make it better.
If you downloaded the version I posted before, try with the new files, which have the latest version of NimROD L&F for Java SE6 with some minor bugs corrected when used with NB6.5. The theme was also modified to be able to read code in the javadoc window (the javadoc module has a bug because it uses hard typed colors that is already reported).
Ciao for now!

Marcelo

[Marcelo Ruiz]

For the curious, a screen shot of Dark NetBeans as result of following the steps of my previous topic.
Enjoy!

Marcelo.

[capnhud]

How do you download the file for the screenshot in this thread?


Edit nvrmind had to scroll sideways to see the download.

[capnhud]

Not a bad change.

[jennyy]

Using Netbeans under Windows, I always get the following error when trying to update / checkout, any file from our subversion repository.

I have installed Collabnet svn client version 1.5.5 and the server is version 1.4.6

For your info, calling directly subversion client from the command line for the same files worked ok.

Does anyone have an idea on this problem ?
Is netbeans working with subversion 1.4 ?

Gérard156-315.71
1Z0-550
E20-329
1Z0-525
642-279
650-987
650-367
650-377
650-378
650-379