Custom dark theme syntax highlighting for Processing

I’ve learned that after looking at a coding interface for hours that is white, it starts to get tiring. Since I design user interfaces all day … I had a thought that I might be able to change the colors, I had some something similar for extendScript toolkit a while back ago so I figured I would give it a shot for this. I poked around for a while and found a few files I needed. It’s actually very easy…I’m surprised I didn’t find documentation on it (though I’m sure it’s out there somewhere).

Here are the steps I took to change it

1. You have to go into this folder:
   /Applications/Processing.app/Contents/Resources/Java/modes/java/theme
   note: you have to right click processing and select “view contents” to get into it, since it’s an .app file.
2. then replace the files in there with the following files: customSyntaxHighlighting.zip (make sure you backup in case something goes wrong!) or you can just redownload the program.
3. This last step isn’t necessary but helps make the text more readable. Go into preferences of processing and changes to these values:

this allows for your text to be anti-aliased and bumps up the font to a little bit of a more readable size.

Ideally I would have liked it to look like this, however I wasn’t quite able to

So if any of you out there are UI hackers and know how to get closer, let me know in comments. Hit me up with any other questions you have as well. I have tested this with Processing 1.0 as well as newly released 2.0

edit: added another theme, check it out. use this file instead for mode folder:

lukasz-themev2