I’ve made several posts previously about the difficulties I’ve had with Eclipse and Gnome’s Adwaita theme: menu elements that have too little contrast to read, poor color choices, etc. I even took a stab at creating my own GTK3 theme to deal with the problem.
I’m happy to report that my efforts are now obsolete. Eclipse Mars (now available in Fedora 22) has made significant improvements to the Dark theme (set under Preferences -> General -> Appearance). However, if you’re using Adwaita, the top menu bar is gray text on grey background. The simple fix is to change to the Adwaita Dark theme just for Eclipse. Here’s how:
- Open
/usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktopin your text editor of choice. - Modify the
Execline to readExec=env GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark eclipse - Done!
The one gotcha is that when you update the eclipse-platform package, it will destroy the changes you’ve made in the desktop file so you’ll have to redo them. But that’s a small price to pay in my opinion.
Eclipse Mars with the Adwaita Dark GTK theme.
- Open
Dear Internet,
As I noted in an earlier post, Eclipse on Fedora 22 has some usability problems with the colors it uses. Eclipse uses GTK 3 for a lot of the theming of the interface. With the Gnome Adwaita theme, several of the drop-down dialogs (like Content Assist) have very little contrast between the background and foreground of a selected item. The result is the highlighted text is extremely difficult to read. Your only recourse is to mess with GTK settings.
I had managed to address an issue with the Content Assist drop-down only to run into another issue with the Quick Outline drop-down. Finally I gave up and said, “to heck with it, I’m going to redo the whole thing.” To check out the result I came up with, head over to the Eclipse Graphene repo.
Here’s an example:
When I write Java, I use Eclipse. It does what I need it to do, but there are a few things about it that bother me. One of them is that Eclipse allows very limited control over the color scheme. Most of the color settings are inherited from the desktop theme that you’re using. I recently upgraded to Fedora 22 and with the Adwaita theme under XFCE, this is what the Eclipse content assist dropdown looks like:
Can you read the top selection?
Notice how close the foreground and background colors are for the selected item. I find that intolerable. I’m not sure exactly why Eclipse is picking that color combination, because the content assist object is a GtkTreeView which has the selected item background color set to cerulean blue in Adwaita. In any case, to fix it create
~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.csswith the following contents:GtkTreeView:selected { background-color: @theme_selected_bg_color; }That snippet will override whatever weirdness is going on with the content assist dropdown and set the background color back to the theme’s default background color for selected items. You can also just set it to a hex value. Note that this setting will apply to any GTK3 application, but that should be all right since you’re just asking the theme to do what it is already doing.
Technitribe by Tim Bielawa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.