Getting Monokai on Eclipse

I’ve always been a stickler for aesthetics. If you’re anything like me, you probably hate Eclipse’s default syntax highlighting colour scheme, which looks like it drew inspiration from a baby’s first attempt at finger painting. There’s just something that just makes staring at code feel like a drag. Fortunately, Eclipse has plugins for custom colour themes and a nice dark UI. As soon as I figured that out, I looked for the colour scheme I was most familiar with because of Sublime Text: Monokai. Unfortunately, the Sublime Text Monokai Extended and Sublime Text 2 themes packaged with the Eclipse Colour Themes plugin are a bit off (and I don’t even know what their Monokai is supposed to be), most noticeably with the comment colouring being white, which is mildly infuriating to no end.

Since the Eclipse Colour Themes website just came back up from maintenance (it’s been down since at least the beginning of the semester), I finally got my hands on their theme generator so I could make my own more faithful adaptation of the Monokai TextMate theme. I adapted the hex codes from the original theme to fit into the Eclipse Colour Theme generator the best that I could, and gave birth to the (unoriginally titled) Monoright.

Unfortunately, there are limitations to the generator, so there are a couple elements that are still off for Java highlighting, not to mention that the HTML highlighting is completely bogus, but it should be overall a pretty faithful rendition of Monokai for Eclipse. (To actually add tag highlighting for HTML, simply change the hex value for “localVariableDeclaration” from #F8F8F2 to #F92672.)

Hope that helps!