kung fu grippe

[⇧embiggen screengrabs⇧: Twilight | IR Black | Brilliance Dull]

For Nerds Only: My Favorite Textmate Themes

@hotdogsladies I would sacrifice a ridiculous amount of children/seniors/animals to know what TextMate theme you use.

You can keep your seniors, Ron. But, thanks for the request.

Above are screengrabs of the three Textmate themes that have been my go-tos over time.

Twilight (built-in, I believe) had been the undisputed champ since Christ was a corporal (and as I use it again right this sec, I’m tempted to go back).
IR Black has been my theme for a few months, and I do like it. It’s got TONS of elements, so (time permitting) it’d be easy to hack on
Like pretty much everything subtleGradient makes, I also really like Brilliance Dull (and its sibling, Brilliance Black). Both are super-useful and lovely, especially it you’re a serious coder.¹

Biggest problem I run into with many themes is that, since I spend pretty much all day in MultiMarkdown, I obviously favor themes that work well with my preferred flavor of Markdown. And, for whatever reason, I guess a lot of the elements in MMD just aren’t “caught” by many themes. So, there’s often not the level and kind of syntax highlighting I’d find useful.

Of course, I have to mention that MMD’s daddy, Fletcher Penney, was kind enough to build us fanboys a MultiMarkdown theme (zip) as part of his terrific MMD bundle, but, unfortunately, for my own needs…

It’s so limited to MMD that it leaves most very other kind of TM doc looking like vanilla plain txt; and
I just can’t roll with light-background themes. My eyes are just too old.

Obviously, if any of you’all are theme-fishing, the best place to start is probably on the UserSubmittedThemes page of the Textmate wiki.

FWIW, I really try not to obsess over stuff like themes for text editors, the style and color of my bash prompt, or what have you. But, on the other hand, I do spend a lot of my day staring at this junk, so it really pays to find anything that will make that environment more pleasant and headache-free.

P.S.: It’s nothing short of sorcery how Pastie knows and utilizes whichever theme you were using when you posted. Crazy.

Do not miss Thomas’s insane GitHub repository. In particular, I recommended every TextMate fan immediately grab and learn both SelectStuff.tmbundle and the titular subtlegradient.tmbundle. For reasons you’ll soon discover, both these bundles are simply magic. ↩