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TextMate is one of the most used and well-loved applications for Mac OS X-based designers and developers. Even if it does look like TextMate 2.0 is likely vaporware, the existing app (currently at version 1.5.9) still delivers the goods.
One of our favorite features of TextMate — and really, any modern text editor — is the ability to customize the look and feel. For designers and developers, this can be really fantastic, as we often spend the better part of our day in front of an open text editor and white on black text can sometimes get to be a little much. Likewise, having color schemes that can help highlight different elements of code that you frequently use can make the entire process much more enjoyable.
Here are 11 of our favorite themes for TextMate — note, these also work with Sublime Text and E Text Editor for Windows. For your designing pleasures, you can download all of the themes in this roundup on GitHub.
Clouds
Fred LeBlanc's Clouds and Clouds Midnight themes offer something for both fans of light and dark styles.
Clouds is a great fit for CSS while Clouds Midnight (see next) does some terrific work with PHP.
Clouds Midnight
Fred LeBlanc's Clouds and Clouds Midnight themes offer something for both fans of light and dark styles.
Clouds (see previous) is a great fit for CSS while Clouds Midnight does some terrific work with PHP.
Fluidvision
Bruce Clark created Fluidvision and it is one of my favorite light themes. What makes it nice is that the background, while light, isn't white, but rather a very light grey.
Freckle
Freckle is easy on the eyes and does a fantastic job with code highlighting.
IR_Black
Todd Werth calls IR_Black the last TextMate theme you'll ever need. We won't go that far, but it's one of the best dark themes around.
krTheme
Kenneth Reitz created krTheme to be readable and functional. It's awesome.
Monokai
For CSS and PHP work especially, Monokai is a really strong theme with a background that is dark, yet easy on the eyes.
Pastie
Like Freckle, Pastie is easy on the eyes, but the color combination is a bit more low-key.
Putty
We love the use of blue when highlighting PHP, it works really well against the dark background.
Railscasts
Railscasts is good for more than just Rails -- I often use it when writing in Markdown/HTML.
Tubster
Tubster is my favorite TextMate theme and I use it for almost all of my writing for Mashable. It's also very nice for PHP.
While some of these themes are available from their respective authors’ websites or the official TextMate wiki, time has made it more difficult to track down some of our favorites. On that note, we’ve pushed all of our TextMate themes, including those in this list, to GitHub. Just visit this page and you can download the entire collection in one folder. Just double-click on the themes you want to install, or copy them to your Themes folder in ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Themes.
What color theme do you use for coding and designing? Let us know!
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Reviews: TextMate, Windows
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