Contributing

Since pretty much all Eclipse Color Theme users are developers, and since it supports many more editors than a single person could possibly want to use, the project has always been driven by our fantastic contributors.

Please consider contributing if you're missing support for an editor, get annoyed by a bug or just want to help - it's greatly appreciated!

Creating an editor mapping

Eclipse Color Themes supports a wide variety of editors via mappings. If you want to add support for an editor, you'll want to create a new mapping.

This doesn't really involve any programming, but some investigating. Here's roughly how it works:

1. Go to the syntax coloring preferences page of the editor, e.g. C/C++->Editor->Syntax Coloring. If the editor doesn't allow you to configure its syntax colouring, there's nothing Eclipse Color Theme can do. Your best bet is to ask the author to make it configurable - they usually do that when asked nicely.

2. Look at the colour theme keys of any theme (See the ColorThemeKeys class for all available keys) and configure the syntax colouring manually using the colours defined there.

3. Open the editor's preferences file, e.g. workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.cdt.ui.prefs and create a new XML file named after the plugin ID in the mapper directory which maps the colour theme's keys to those of the editor.

4. Open plugin.xml and add the new mapping file to the extension point com.github.eclipsecolortheme.theme.

5. Create a pull request.

Creating a theme

To create a new theme, go to eclipsecolorthemes.org, create it, download it in *.xml format and import it from the Color Theme preference page.

Note that we only ship the most popular themes with Eclipse Color Theme, please consider that before creating pull requests that add themes.

Contributing code

Development

All you need is Eclipse PDE. Once you have that, you can import the projects in this repository into an Eclipse workspace.

Finding something to work on

If you already have something you'd like to work on, that's brilliant. You might still want to create an issue before you start to work on your idea. We don't get back to all new issues, but we usually get back to feature ideas.

If you have no idea what to work on but still want to help, that's brilliant too. Have a look at our open issues.

Coding style

• We follow Oracle's code conventions for the Java programming language.
• Indentation is 4 spaces.
• Consistency is what matters most - please make sure your changes are consistent with the surrounding code.

Submitting a pull request

Before you submit your pull request, please make sure ...

1. Your code contributions comply with our coding style.
2. You don't make any unrelated changes - please make separate pull requests for separate changes.
3. You have added a summary of your changes to CHANGES.md.
4. You have updated README.md if necessary.

That saves us time and makes it quite likely that we'll merge your changes quickly.

We aren't always able to react right away, since this is nobody's full time job. But feel quite free to post a friendly reminder if you don't hear from anyone for weeks.

Note that we currently make a release every few months, so it might take a while for your changes to make it into the stable version. The main reason for that is that we want to do some testing before releasing a new version, and we don't have the time to do that in shorter cycles. We'll probably have a separate continuously released update site at some point though.