April 14th in Off Topic by .

Solarize – Solarized Based Theme For Notepad++


A couple of days ago Ethan Schoonover released Solarized, a color palette designed for use with terminal and gui applications. Over the last 6 months or so I have been using Notepad++ more and more for my daily coding. The default theme is just to harsh and I have been using the Bespin theme for some time now. While this is a really well designed theme, I always felt that there are some aspects of it that I just did not like but, could never quite pin point it.

When I read about Solarized, I was very exited. Having switched from the default Notepad++ theme to Bespin, I know the difference a good theme can make in terms of the strain placed on your eyes when you spend countless hours staring at the screen. Solarized currently has formats for Vim, Mutt, Xresources, iTerm2, OS X Terminal.app and color palettes for  PhotoShop, Apple Color Picker and Gimp.

Unfortunately no support for Notepad++ yet but, on the site for Solarized, Ethan goes into detail about how it was designed and how to use the various colors in the palette. With this, I decided to jump right in and create a theme for Notepad++ using the guidelines and color palette from Solarized.

Below is a screen shot of the Solarize theme displaying a JavaScript file in Notepad++

JavaScript with the Solarize theme

From the screen shot you can see that it has a soft, low contrast look with the important parts of the interface and code clearly standing out from the rest. I have used this for a while now and find it a joy to use. Currently I have covered the following languages:

  • Java
  • SQL
  • PHP
  • HTML
  • JavaScript
  • CSS
  • C
  • XML
  • Properties File
  • Python

There are surely tweaks that can be made and support for more languages will be added. The other aspect of Solarized is that there is the dark palette, that you see here, and then a light palette. Currently I have only completed the dark theme and will be adding a Solarize Light theme soon.

UPDATE: Applied fix for background colors if you do not use a global override.

You can currently grab the theme from my fork on Github, which will hopefully be pulled into the master soon, fork it, improve on it or just send me your thoughts and suggestions on Github or here in the comments. Looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts.

* Image courtesy esbie

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  • http://www.matthewhollett.com/ Mh

    Thanks very much for this! Looking forward to the Light theme.

  • https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawnUnFZSOG-1xxwDxtQpYA-lDf3y20caaYc Michal

    Hi, I just downloaded your theme. I noticed that a sort of brown colour with hex code 2A211C is used for backgrounds a lot. This doesn’t seem to be any of the Solarized colours. I replaced it with base03 and now it works great for me.

    • Anonymous

      Hi there Michal,

      I actually override the background with the Global Config but I guess this does not apply by default so I will fix this issue and drop you a note once the new one is there. Thanks for the heads up.

  • Anonymous

    I just downloaded the file from Github and when I activate the new style in Notepad++ I get a dialog saying “Load stylers.xml failed!” and the list of styles is garbled up with odd characters. (The colors look nice though.)

    • Anonymous

      Currently working on the theme and ironing out some of the details. The error you mentioned just might steer me in the right direction regarding some of the issues I had.

      • http://twitter.com/raccoontrails racoontrails

        I had the same problem, but realized I needed to download the “raw” file in order to get it to work. I love the theme, but I have to say, “Turn from the dark side.” :) Can’t wait for the light version!!!

  • ts

    Hej Schalk!
    To ease things with the light theme, consider using this: http://framework.lojcomm.com.br/tmTheme2nppStyler/

    I just found it on a German website and it works perfect when pasting https://github.com/deplorableword/textmate-solarized/blob/master/Solarized%20(light).tmTheme there.

    Tilman

    • Anonymous

      Thanks, will have a look at it.

  • Anonymous

    Made updates to the dark theme and added the first version of the light theme. Please note that the light theme is very early stages, feedback welcomed : http://goo.gl/bLpmG

  • Seth

    Thanks for taking the time to do this.

    • Anonymous

      Thanks for the comment Seth. Still a lot to do and I have distracted by other side projects and work. Will be sure to pick this one up and again at some point and finish both themes off.

  • http://twitter.com/pavlicko david pavlicko

    Wow, these are awesome themes for notepad++. Thank you! 
    Just installed both the dark and light versions and absolutely love them. All I had to do was italicize the comments and I was all set.(for anyone that runs across the ‘error’ on install, make sure you click the ‘download’ button on github to get the correct xml files – copy paste them into the themes folder inside of notepad++ and you’re good to go…) 

    • Anonymous

      Hey David, thanks for the comment and I am glad you like it. There is still some work to be done on these, especially the light theme, and I hope to get back to this very soon. If you feel like contributing, you are of course more then welcome.

  • Rob

    Thanks for the great work. One note, on the “light” version, the XML declaraction should be before the comment (as in the “dark” version) as opposed to after the header comment. This was causing Notepad++ to crash when importing the scheme.

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