Oracle SQL Developer Theme

The last days I have spend some time to change the theme of Oracle SQL Developer (my current version is 19.4.0.354). Oracle SQL Developer is one of the last tools of my tool set that do not support dark themes by default and so I have done some web research what is possible.

I found OzBsidian by Sergey Stadnik on github (link) for PL/SQL syntax highlighting and that was already a great step in the direction I wanted to go.

But there was a lot of space for optimizing to get a whole “dark” theme experience. So I have done more research and read and article by That Jefff Smith (link) and there a folder themes (sqldeveloper\ide\themes) was mentioned.

In this folder you can find a html file creating_themes.html that describes how to create a custom theme basically.

I played around a lot with the contents of fusionblue.jar and created my own darktheme.jar and placed it in the themes folder but the option to select my theme is missing in new versions of Oracle SQL Developer.

So I replaced the original fusionblue.jar with my changed version (please make a copy when trying on yourself) and got first promising results. After some time the best dark theme I was able to create looked like this:

Most everything was like I wanted it to by but not the execution plan output! So this was a show stopper. There were still items I could not style via fusionblue.jar.

So I decided to create a theme that would satisfy my need for no white backgrounds and also support the default black and blue text.

The result looks like this:

This is the compromise that is OK for me. There are still modules with white background but for my daily use I am satisfied with that solution.

The source code (eclipse project) you can find on my github repository OracleSqlDeveloper_Theme (link). There is also a release version that contains a compiled fusionblue.jar (please backup your existing fusionblue.jar for rollback).

If you want to experiment on your own, you can extract the original theme.properties file from fusionblue.jar (via zip tool) and try to add/change additional settings to fullfill your needs. Maybe you can use my project as starting point for a cool new theme and share with us.

Be careful when using the code referenced in this story. Please only use it if you fully understand the functionality and can maintain it yourself.

Addendum 2020–08–29: Install Theme on MacOS

To install the theme on a MAC open the SQL Developer application package in the Finder application. Navigate to the SQL Developer application and click “Show Package Contents” in the Task menu.

This will open the package in the finder application and you can navigate within the internal package folder structure. You can find the themes folder within “Contents”-”Resources”-”sqldeveloper”-”ide”-”themes”. You can now copy the fusionblue.jar into this folder and on next start the new theme will by used.