Filed under: Internet
TextMate themes collection
I love playing with TextMate themes. I tend to get bored easily, and besides a proclivity for dark backgrounds that impair readability, I'm always up for variety. That's why I'm pleased to see TM Themes, developed by Garrett Bjerkhoel, hit the TextMate theme scene. The site is starting out with a small collection of themes, but features a simple interface with rollover and full previews, a rating system, comment option and theme uploader. Hopefully it will become a good source for coders to find means of expressing their individual creativity, a trait which many don't realize is innate to the coding species.
The TextMate wiki offers a large collection of user-contributed themes, and there are other collections as well. For the most part, though, the themes are found individually across the web. It's fun to see collections coming together and TextMate fans providing services like this for other users.

![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)


Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
RWhitney said 5:42PM on 1-03-2008
"I tend to get bored easily, and besides a proclivity for dark backgrounds that impair readability"
Haha... That is good.
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Shane said 6:44PM on 1-03-2008
Dark text on dark backgrounds would be hard to read. Light text on a dark background is fine :-) I find that dark backgrounds are often easier on the eyes for long coding sessions.
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Garrett Bjerkhoel said 7:03PM on 1-03-2008
I am sorry you guys if TM Themes is having hosting problems, A Small Orange is trying to figure it out :(
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Brett Terpstra said 7:21PM on 1-03-2008
@Shane: While it's debatable and case-specific, several research projects have shown that dark on light is generally more readable, often because of the "halation" effect that light on dark can cause. As I mentioned, I am strongly drawn toward the light on dark themes myself and have found that the right color combinations paired with the right font (I like DejaVuSansMono and Inconsolata) are actually, like you said, more relaxing.
@Garrett: Good luck :).
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link.dupont said 12:11AM on 1-04-2008
Is it me, or do themes downloaded from the new TextMate themes site come in as .colloquyTranscript files (Safari appears to be appending .colloquyTranscript to the file, so they come in as ThemeName.tmTheme.colloquyTranscript. I've tried two themes, and both come in as .colloquyTranscript files.
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Brett Terpstra said 12:31AM on 1-04-2008
@link.dupont: It's not just you, although I don't know offhand what makes Safari do that. It doesn't happen on every one, and it never seems to happen in Firefox. But I did have to rename a a couple of Safari downloads. I wonder if it's something in the server's content-type settings.
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Garrett Bjerkhoel said 1:27AM on 1-04-2008
The script only appends the .tmTheme file type, I will look into it though. Although it's never happened to me before.
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