How to get the old color theme in Eclipse Luna?

Question

I have installed Eclipse Luna and for some reason they have removed the default light colored theme that I\'m familiar with.

Answer 1

You have to distinguish a syntax colors issue (Eclipse preferences) from a widget colors issue (Eclipse theme). I think you're dealing with the second one.

You are using a dark OS theme, Eclipse is build on SWT that uses system widget. If an Eclipse (CSS) theme does not init a bright color for each widget then for it is used the color defined by your OS theme. Only the Dark theme tries to set a dark color scheme for each widget; the Classic, Default, GTK etc. themes have always supposed that the user is using a bright OS theme so they don't define specific colors for each widget (and they never did it).

Moreover Eclipse 4.4+ switched to GTK3 by default, the SWT porting on GTK3 has still some rendering issues and some more limitations compared to the previous Eclipse versions based on GTK2 (you can notice them especially when switching to the Eclipse Dark theme).

Supposing that with your current configuration and Eclipse 4.3- you have the desired appearance, a workaround can be running Eclipse in GTK2-compatible mode by starting it with a script like this:

#!/bin/bash
export SWT_GTK3=0
./eclipse

If this doesn't solve your issue, you have to edit the desired CSS theme in \eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.ui.themes_*version*\css\ by adding a bunch of rules to init each relevant widget to a bright color scheme.