Written by Simon Bailey

Dan aka PolyGeek has reminded me that I have been meaning to write a short post about using a darker theme in Flash Builder. In IntelliJ IDEA I use the fantastic Dark Pastels theme by Ted Wise but for Flash Builder a.k.a Eclipse I could not find a similar theme (ok thats a lie, I found some dark themes but it wasn’t to my liking). So I decided to tackle the arduous task of going through all the preferences and setting the fonts and colours manually.

Initially I exported my preferences to an .epf file but Eclipse was temperamental on how it would import these settings and I could not get a consistent result. I then found this post and then dived into the workspace for Flash Builder and if you have the standalone version your in for a treat as it only really shows ActionScript and MXML related preferences so you don’t have to dive through a mine field of different language preferences.

I have uploaded my preferences which result in an IDE looking like the below screen shots, may not be to your taste but its a start to get fiddling. NOTE that I have stripped out certain settings not really applicable so please don’t overwrite your existing files as you will lose your existing settings. I imported these as they are directly into a new workspace and it worked fine for me though.

Just to confirm location:

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[workspace]\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings\org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs
[workspace]\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings\org.eclipse.ui.editors.prefs
Linux/Mac [workspace]/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/

eclipse_settings