Eclipse Color Themes and Domino Designer

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Jesse Gallagher, amongst others, has blogged before about installing the Eclipse Color Themes plugin into Domino Designer, to give a richer styling for editors. It’s something I did a long time ago and my preferred theme is part of the preferences I have exported from Domino Designer.

But when I installed 9.0.1 I did a fresh install, so didn’t have the Eclipse Color Theme plugin installed. That was not a problem though, because the theme still worked. But without the plugin, you have that theme shown but you can’t switch themes, which you might want to do when you’re presenting, as I did today at DanNotes. So I went to File > Application > Install and entered the remote link to the Eclipse Color Theme GitHub install. I wasn’t expecting it to fail saying that there were no acceptable features. I tried a few other instances of Domino Designer. Still the same.

It turns out a new version of Eclipse Color Theme was released last week, v.0.13.0, and it only support Eclipse 3.5 onwards. It uses Maven to build the project and if you look at the update site project, it has a category.xml and pom.xml rather than the site.xml that anyone who’s worked with plugins for Domino Designer is used to.

theme 13

The resolution was to download the source for v0.12.0 and import the projects into Eclipse.

theme 12

Then build the Update Site project:

updateSite 1

Then export it to File System:

updateSite 2

updateSite 3

Then you can import that into Domino Designer without a problem.

4 thoughts on “Eclipse Color Themes and Domino Designer”

  1. Great, thanks for sharing!
    But did you try to import that built updatesite project into the Domino updatesite? Tried it but got an error while importing. Installing directly as a local folder worked but I would like to have that on my own updatesite on the servers to access it from all my Designer clients.

    1. Hi Oliver, it works for me. It sounds like you’re hitting a known issue with the Update Site import, that it fails if you have first imported into Designer during that Notes session. I first hit that a few years ago and found the cause in a blog post by (I think) either Paul Calhoun or Russell Maher. Close down Notes and Designer, open Notes and try again.

  2. Hi Paul
    Thx for sharing, but as a novice to eclipse I don’t know how to build the Plug-in.
    Could you share the plug-in file that you build? Thx 🙂

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