Specials Board

Specials Board Is a Light-on-Dark Text Editor Theme for Panic Coda and Apple Xcode

I've never been a big fan of light-on-dark text editor themes, generally finding the contrast insufferable. However, after noticing that a bright display was giving me headaches, I started searching for a good light-on-dark theme for the text editor I use the most, Panic Software’s Coda. Following an unrelated tweet I discovered Ryan Bates' beautiful, and subtle, Railcast Theme for TextMate and decided to re-create the essence of that theme for Panic Coda. The end result references both the Railscast theme as well as its inspiration, idlefingers by Damien Timewell.

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When Panic rolled out the Panic Coda 2.0 text editor they invited me to include the theme by default. I've also extrapolated the theme to Apple's Xcode integrated development environment following the syntax color grouping rules of the higher contrast Midnight theme.

The Specials Board theme for Panic Coda 1.x includes .seestyle files for all programming languages that Coda supports out of the box. Not just Ruby, PHP, XHTML, CSS and the others referenced in the demo screencaps, but ASP, Python, Smarty, Action Script, Java and all the others. In addition to the default modes included with Coda, Specials Board includes a .seestyle for the Joe Bergantine Django Template language mode and, with the help of Rudolf Adamkovič, Andrew Porter, Christopher Hendrix and Mark Learst it also includes .seestyle files for bash, CoffeeScript, i18n, Makefile, YAML, jQuery, MooTools, LESS, SASS and WordPress. More instructions on finding, downloading, and installing custom syntax modes can be found in the project's Readme file.

Word on the Street

“I've shared [this theme] with all of my coworkers, and have it in my dropbox account so that I can install it whenever I encounter a fresh copy of Coda.”

Eli Horne

“Excellently done, sir. Really easy on the eyes.”

Leland

“Great theme! Thanks for sharing!”

Jimmy

“This theme is great. I love the colors.”

Jochem

“This [theme] looks great. Thank you!”

Bruce