This is just a short post based on a question I received on twitter: Can one use JavaFX CSS to theme the IDE? Answer: Of course you can! I don’t know myself why people like the dark themes so much but well some do and making your IDE go black with SWT on JavaFX is no more than those 5 lines of CSS:
.root {
-fx-base: rgb(50, 50, 50);
-fx-background: rgb(50, 50, 50);
-fx-control-inner-background: rgb(50, 50, 50);
}
and you get this
use that
.root {
-fx-base: #7eaacc;
-fx-background: #7eaacc;
-fx-control-inner-background: white;
}
and you get
Not everything is perfectly ok because it looks like some parts of the IDE are setting their color in SWT anyways I think it shows the power of JavaFX CSS. Imagine what a real designer could do to your (commercial) IDE if it gets based on SWT on JavaFX.
I think the SWT CSS people can learn some bits from this. JavaFX derives ALL colors e.g. that the tree-text-color is white from those 3 values!
BTW the file displayed in the center has approximately 10 000 lines of code and it scrolls instantly – more on that in another post.
Anyways that’s it for today!
Tomsondev Blog 
Will you please give us a readymade theme or step-by-step tutorial to achieve something like http://blog.macsales.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/OWC_photoshop_cs6_on_retina.jpg? I downloaded Luna M6 for Win7 to try the dark theme but nothing was visible in the editor.
What you see at this point is a pre-alpha version of SWT – we are far away from a point in time to get something stable
Hi Tom,
I think you need to update you blog entry, because it would be a great magic to get two different looking UI’s with the same CSS. That’s something like product-management would like to have but I think that’s not possible. 😉
Regards
René
P.S.: Sorry that I didn’t find a lot of time in the last couple of weeks to help you more on swt_on_fx, but it’s great to see that the StyledText seems to work now.
Argh – sorry fixed!
Good to see you in Action! 🙂 I personally would love to see Eclipse on FX. Maybe there is only one thing missing: The window decorations. I’m no designer, so I have no idea, what the correct approach would be, but I think a custom decoration (to match the overall theme) would be plausible, don’t you thik?
What do you thing how far is your port? Some firends of mine maintain an (older) application based on Eclispe RCP (an obscure mixture of 3.x and 4.x) and use a lot of Eclipse Forms – would they already work properly on SWT_on_JavaFX?
Regards,
Daniel
I’m not yet sure forms will work – this all is a step by step process – we now have a fairly complete SWT implementation and have to work on a bug by bug base to get this thing more stable. This all is pre alpha work. On the window decoration I agree – this would need to be replace by a custom rendering!
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Hi Tom, I just came to your blog. Was fascinated to see eclipse ide running in javafx mode. I am dying to know how it can be done. I use eclipse ide and would like to get it run in JavaFx mode. Please, tell me how it can be done.
We stopped development in this area, after the PoC. So there’s nothing you can run.
Hi Tom,
Can you share the reason why you stopped the development in Eclipse on JavaFX, as well as SWT on JavaFX? My company has developed an application based on Eclipse RCP framework and to be honest, the UI based on SWT is quite ugly and obsolete. I was very happy when I found out the port from SWT to JavaFX. However, that happy moment did not last long as the library is no longer maintained.
well there are multiple-reasons:
We advise people to take what is there, maybe fix something here and there and move the complete UI gradually to FX and if you want to stay on RCP you should use e(fx)clipse-e4-renders.