5 Dark Themes for Aptana

If Aptana is your IDE of choice and you love every single feature forgiving any weakness, but your eyes after 8 hours coding just can’t tolerate the default bright theme, this is your post. These dark color themes for Aptana will bring some rest to your eyes.

NightLion


Includes color themes for CSS, HTML, Javascript, jSON, PHP, PHP Doc, PHP Smarty, PHP Smarty Config, ScriptDoc and XML.

Autumna


Includes color themes for CSS, HTML, Javascript, PHP, PHP Doc and ScriptDoc.

Green Chaud


Includes color themes for CSS, HTML, Javascript, PHP, and XML.

Sunburst


Includes color themes for CSS, ERB, HTML, Javascript, PHP, XML and YML.

Sunburst is no longer available

LPent Shades


This last theme is the one I use (but got replaced after writing this article by Autumna). It’s only published on the Aptana forum with no name (LPent is his username at Aptana forums) and its author gives this explanation regarding the colors:

I like to use different color-schemes for each file type. That way you can easilly distingiush between different types of code when they are used in the same file (for example CSS inside html-file or HTML inside php-file).

And it really works, the different shades help you to quickly distinguish the codes when you work in Aptana with three panes side by side. Includes color themes for CSS, HTML, JS and PHP. In addition to the shades shown on the image above, the shades for PHP are red and the shades for JS are green.

LPent Shades is no longer available

Do you know of any other dark theme for Aptana that we might be missing here?

14 thoughts on “5 Dark Themes for Aptana”

  1. Most of the downloads don’t work. You should host the downloads yourself so they don’t get lost like this. One even gives a 403 permissions error in french… would love to check out sunburst and Lpent, wish the links worked correctly. Thanks for this post anyway.

  2. Dale, three out of five themes are still available so I would say that most of the downloads do work.
    Now, I won’t host the downloads by myself because I want you to at least visit the author’s site and possibly while you’re there to consider leaving a comment showing your appreciation.
    Thanks for your comment Dale.

  3. I know this is an old post, but I just wanted to say I am surprised to see you featured my theme (LPent Shades). Way back when I published it, everybody reacted in such a dismissive way that I gave up on it. I still use themes with shades in my IDEs since to me it makes sense. I’m glad someone else got to use it and liked it.

    1. oh wow so cool to know that you were the creator! Thanks for crafting that theme! Yeah, as pointed in the post, that was the theme I was using in Aptana back then and was very helpful to quickly know which file type it was. I use VS Code nowadays and haven’t found any similar theme.

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