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Author's profile photo Sascha Wächter

Darkest Dark Theme for Eclipse with ADT

I really like Abap in Eclipse and work with Eclipse every day. But if you work every day with Eclipse it’s really exhausting for your eyes because of the bright UI. ( And the standard theme is a bit boring 🙂 )

So i searched for a possibility to use the dark theme with ABAP in Eclipse. I think many developers tried to use the standard dark theme in Eclipse.

But…

it doesn’t looks so great.

So what is the alternative that you can use a dark theme for developing with Abap in Eclipse?

The answer is the Darkest Dark Theme for Eclipse plugin. You simplay can go to Help > Eclipse Marketplace and search for “Darkest Dark”.

Then you have to install the Darkest Dark Theme and restart Eclipse after the installation finished. You see immediately that it looks really good. 😉

Finally, you can customize the editor a little if you want or serach the internet for existing editor configurations which match the dark theme for Abap in Eclipse.

To change the configuration of the Editor you can go to Window > Preferences and then switch to General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts. For example we chance the color of Keywords from violet to orange.

If you apply and close you have to refresh your source and see the difference:

 

 

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      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Sascha, you made my day or should i say my ADT ?

       

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Sascha,

      Woah, that's amazing. So much more consistent than moonrise! Many thanks.

      Now, only menu bar and table headers are left hurting my eyes. But in your screenshots it looks like there is a solution for the table headers as well. How did you get them black?

      Cheers,

      Johannes

      Author's profile photo Sascha Wächter
      Sascha Wächter
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Johannes,

      in my tutorial i used new Eclipse Oxygen and their the table headers are also black. But currently I am still using Eclipse Neon and their the table aren't black as you said. So i think when using ADT with Eclipse Oxygen  you would have black table headers. 🙂

      I had a few problems ADT in Eclipse Oxygen the so I decided to wait a bit before I use it, because Oxygen is pretty new.

      Greets,

      Sascha

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      I had a few problems ADT in Eclipse Oxygen

      AFAIK there's no official Oxygen compatible ADT release, atleast i don't see one in the SAP Dev Tools update site.

      Author's profile photo Sascha Wächter
      Sascha Wächter
      Blog Post Author

      Yes you are right. Thats the reason why I currently use Eclipse Neon untill there is a ADT release for Oxygen. But for this tutorial I used Oxygen with ADT for Neon but had a few problems while using it so I decided to wait and switched back to Neon.

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Ah ok, I see. Then I'm really looking forward to the ADT for Oxygen release (does anyone know when it is going to be released?). I'd also installed it already, but it wasn't properly working for me either.

      Best,

      Johannes

      Author's profile photo Fabian Lupa
      Fabian Lupa

      Darkest dark is really good. Here's how I got it at the moment:

      It's a shame though ABAP syntax highlighting is not really using the native eclipse settings, so you cannot use color scheme plugins to manage all these settings for you.

      Author's profile photo Anton Kozhin
      Anton Kozhin

      Darkest Dark Theme works great for me - it's easier on the eyes. There are many good-looking presets for syntax highlighting and it's really unfortunate that they don't work with ADT.

      But flat icon sets are the true beauty! 🙂

       

       

      Author's profile photo Matthias Becker
      Matthias Becker

      Pls. note that with ADT 2.80 and Eclipse Oxygen we now have first basic support of Eclipse's Standard Dark Theme. Maybe you want to give it a try.

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Guys,

      Did you update the Darkest Dark theme? There are some nice goodies.

      Author's profile photo Sandra Rossi
      Sandra Rossi

      My experience with the latest theme Darkest Dark 2017 CI 13b :

      • Doesn't work? If so, remember that you shouldn't restart Eclipse before the "is installed" popup shows up (somehow I imagined it was installed synchronously and so I restarted immediately - Eclipse works massively asynchronously...)
      • Uncheck the "Inline search" because it doesn't have the replacement option and Ctrl+F is redirected from the find&replace dialog to the inline search. So please either at installation time uncheck it, or change it later via the menu Window -> Preferences -> DevStyle -> Inline Search.
      • When the cursor is on a class or type name, the text in definitions (keywords class and types) appears in white font and orange background, almost unreadable... sorry I couldn't find a solution. Please share if you have found a workaround or solved it.
      Author's profile photo Piotr Naglowski
      Piotr Naglowski

      Hi Sandra,

      Maybe you've already found the answer 4 years after your question ;), but if not, you can find the appropriate setting under Window-> Preferences-> General-> Editors-> Text Editors-> Annotations-> ABAP Occurences Write

      I have another problem with the Darkest Dark theme: only the row numbers of the internal table are shown under the debugger, no content is visible. For this reason, I had to revert to the default dark theme in Eclipse, which is not quite as pretty as the DD theme. Has anyone encountered such a problem and has a solution for it?

      Author's profile photo Denis Mertz
      Denis Mertz

      Great,

       

      Thank you !

       

      Author's profile photo Allan Jones Montemayor
      Allan Jones Montemayor

      Thank you for this. I like the Dark Blue theme of it. I feel sleepy coding when the background is white. But now I can code in ABAP all day all night!

      Author's profile photo Christian Punz
      Christian Punz

      hi folks,

      yes, Darkest Dark looks very attractive to the eye, but beware! It cripples some functionality in ADT. According to Thomas Fiedler the darkest dark plugin does not adhere to "API-standards".
      I saw negative effects using CDS-view-data-preview: could not scroll to the right, could not choose columns via popup.
      I kicked darkest dark and have a much better experience in terms of usability.
      The only drawback is that Eclipse standard dark is not as "beautiful" as darkest dark.

      br

      chris