Specials Board is a light-on-dark .seestyle theme for the Panic Coda text editor
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 Railcast Theme for TextMate and decided to re-create the essence of the theme for Coda. The end result references both the Railscast theme as well as its inspiration, idlefingers by Damien Timewell.
This theme includes .seestyle files for all programming languages that Coda 1.6.4-10 supports. Not just Ruby, PHP, XHTML, CSS and the others referenced below, but ASP, Python, Smarty, Action Script, Java and others. In addition to the default modes included with Coda, Specials Board includes seestyles for the Django and Django-Template modes by Big Nerd Ranch and, with the help of Rudolf Adamkovič it also includes .seestyle files for bash, i18n and Makefile. More instructions on finding, downloading, and installing custom syntax modes can be found in the Wiki.
Installation
View the github Wiki for installation instructions.
License and Attribution
The Specials Board Theme for Coda by Joseph Bergantine is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 License.
Seestyles for the custom syntax modes: bash, gettext i18n, and Makefile courtesy of Rudolf Adamkovič (Salutis)
Package icon is a modified version of the one designed by Min Tran as part of his Milky Icon Set.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What font are you using?
- The font used in the screencaps is Panic Sans which I believe is installed by default with Coda. Recently though, at the recommendation of Dan Benjamin in his post on Programming Fonts, I’ve started using Inconsolata by Raph Levien. Apple’s Menlo is another good option. It is rounded like Inconsolata but has bold and italic variations.
- The colors don’t look nearly as cool/vivid/dark in Coda as they do on the site.
- For a reason unknown to me, possibly having to do with color space profiles, the Edit view in Coda renders lighter than it says it is. A hack to get around this is to set the background color to
#252028 instead of #2b2b2b. When you do that the background color samples as #2b2b2b, just as the background of the site does. You can also use Coda’s color picker to sample the site’s background to get the same result.
What you’re saying
The theme is great, i love the colors.
— Jochem
Great theme! Thanks for sharing!
— Jimmy
Excellently done, sir. Really easy on the eyes.
— Leland Clemmons
Have feedback?