For most of my job I’m stuck in front of Eclipse environment. Maybe the most important benefit it has is its cross-platform compatibility. It’s available to developers working with Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems, and it supports various programming languages. What is it good for?
Hard to explain in only a couple of lines, but it lets you visually parse the code more easily. It helps organize code, yells at you for syntax errors and as mentioned before, can be used a great variety of languages.
Most of the time, I use it for PHP, because it helps me with entering the name of functions, and closes HTML tags automatically when I happen to work with that.
The default setting uses dark letters in front of a white background. Many developers find it to be obtrusive and hard on the eyes, and that’s why those people set a black background instead.
Getting it done is very simple; go to Window > Preferences > General > Appearance > Colors > Fonts menu.
However, there are pre-made backgrounds you can choose from at http://www.eclipsecolorthemes.org/.
There are two ways to download. The first is in XML, for which you’ll need the Eclipse Color Theme Plugin. Second is in EPF. I like the latter, because you can import them with no need for an external solution.
The process is very simple, as you can see in the video below; File> Import > General > Preferences then Next, and choose the EPF file you’d like imported.
How to import Eclipse Preferences (*.epf) from Roger Dudler on Vimeo.
I’ve managed to install the Color Theme plugin (after Googling for instructions). Now how do I import an xml into the plugin? It’s not at all obvious.