Technical Articles
Build your own user experience – Introducing dark theme for SE80
Disclaimer: The author does not advocate the use of the ABAP Workbench. Not even the ABAP Workbench advocates the use of the ABAP Workbench.
But even if you don’t choose to follow my advice, fret not! SE80 offers enough customization options for you to be able to pretend you’re using a modern editor. See for yourself:
If you have a keen eye, you will notice I just dragged a VsCode window over an SE80 window. That is one way to do it, but if you prefer your comfortable workbench and just want the colors, I have a fully integrated solution for you too.
This is what the end result actually looks like in SE80. You could say it’s a day and night difference:
All you need to do is click the tiny 
button in the lower left corner of the transaction, which will open up this menu:
First, note that I changed the text font to Consolas.
Then you just change all the colors. If you try to share your theme with someone else, you will notice the lack of an export button. Everyone has to assemble their own theme from the parts which I will provide, IKEA style.
Edit: I found out there is a config file where you can change the values. Replace abap_spec.xml in Users\AppData\Roaming\SAP\SAP GUI\ABAP Editor with this one.
It’s also not possible to enter hex colors directly into the color picker, so after finding the right colors, I had to convert them to their RGB components first.
One more warning: there is no reset to default button either, so better make note of the original colors. I didn’t, which is why you won’t find them listed below. There’s some additional categories you can fiddle with if you’re interested, but these should be enough.
| Item | Color (R, G, B) |
| All backgrounds | 30, 30, 30 |
|
212, 212, 212 |
| Read-only mode (foreground) | 0, 0, 0 |
| Comments (foreground) | 0, 128, 0 |
| Numbers (foreground) | 181, 206, 168 |
| String (foreground) | 206, 145, 120 |
| Keyword |
Variants: 86 156 214 (Visual Studio blue) 197 134 192 (VSCode pink) 222 132 50 (GitHub-inspired orange) |
I hope you enjoy your enhanced development experience!
You can also use the editor without the ABAP: https://github.com/nomssi/abap_scheme/tree/master/editor
Cool! I had a look through the links in there and it looks like there is actually a way to export the themes documented here.
There should be an abap_spec.xml file on your computer. Aside from colors, it contains some extra things you can fiddle with, like which keywords introduce indentation or a list of keywords. You could delete deprecated keywords from your spec and no longer get autocompletion for them.
Can you publish that appropriate xml file please?
Hi, I'll update the post tomorrow.
Yeah there is a GitHub for themes. Please add your theme into it 🙂
PR submitted.
Very interesting... There is a lot of useful information here!.
J.
Without a doubt, this is the best blog I’ve ever read.
I will immediately change the configuration of the 13+ SE80 environments I'm forced to work in to at least fool my brain for a minute that I'm working in a modern development environment.
Funny how 'old fashioned' becomes "modern".
I started doing this some years ago when I arrived at a project with a really antiquated way of doing things. It was partly a bit of fun, I changed my editor to resemble the old-old style green or orange monochrome monitors, just to put me in the right frame of mind for what I had to work with.
Turned out I really liked it and tweaked it with a few extra color accents and it became my 'standard' setup that I kept around for a good few years of using SE80 at various projects.
Unfortunately I don't use dark mode anymore. I prefer it in principle, but working on such a variety of applications these days I find the frequent switching between light and dark too irritating.
I guess it's partially due to the recent fashion of retro stuff, like t-shirts with cassette tape pictures worn by people who probably never saw a real one 🙂 (just stating a fact, wear whatever you want!)
Anyway it's partly deceptive:
this looks fairly old-fashioned:
...this not so much 🙂
Very cool! I'm too lazy to create my own theme, but will definitely check out yours!
And thanks for the link
There are few on GitHub you can try: https://github.com/lucattelli/ab4-themes
Frederik now added there his theme too 🙂
Good tip..Surely I will try this.
Thank you,
Shyam
I share my own theme, if anyone interested you can download it.
Thanks this looks cool.
Hello Frederick,
I tried to put the theme but it is giving me error 'DTD is prohibited' when opening editor in SE38. Any idea what could be the reason ?
Hi,
I tried it but I don’t see any errors in SE38. You could try the following: