My PHP IDE of choice is Eclipse with the PDT plugin.

The thing is, I always feel a little snow blind after a day’s coding, staring at that white screen all day. So much so that I’ve undertaken the arduous task of tweaking my colour preferences to match the Obsidian theme found in the more recent versions of Notepad++. Why Eclipse can’t take some lead from Notepad++ and Aptana and make this process much easier, I don’t know but here’s the end result.

PHP file with Obsidian theme
PHP file with Obsidian theme

Mixed PHP and HTML file with Obsidian theme
Mixed PHP and HTML file with Obsidian theme

I’ve also created some preference files so you can play along at home. Please note that whilst I’ve made sure the preference files only contain colour data, I’ve only done minor testing but so far, everything has gone well. My setup is Eclipse Galileo with PDT 2.1 however I don’t think there’s any version specific stuff in the files.

To install the colour preferences:

  1. Download one of the below packages and extract the contents to a temporary directory
  2. Fire up Eclipse
  3. Backup your current preferences by going to File -> Export -> General -> Preferences. Follow the instructions from there to create a preferences file. Make sure you choose “Export all”.
  4. Go to File -> Import -> General -> Preferences and select the Obsidian/eclipse.epf file. Click “Finish”

I’ve also included some Aptana colourisation files for CSS and JavaScript however I haven’t yet created preferences for other Aptana editors.

Enjoy and keep watching for more themes.

Obsidian.tar.gz
Obsidian.zip