Wittmaxi
commented
1 month ago I love this change! Having see the difference it can make, I can not wait for this to be in my IDE. Thank you!!!
I might be alone with this opinion, but to me the new theme looks almost unchanged and I feel like a bigger contrast might look even better. From your presentation I know that you copied the values of VScode but to me, the light theme looks nearly unchanged. Have you experimented with "greater contrasts" already?
laeubi
HeikoKlare
thomasritter
vogella
humphreygao
PyvesB
HannesWell
iloveeclipse
mvm-sap
BeckerWdf
I am not sure what I expect here but the staging view does not feel coherent. Maybe the outside should be light and the commit message box should be dark?
Phillipus
estepper
Known issues
First version has been submitted. Here the list of already known issues we will work on.
Status quo
A lot of Eclipse users are asking for a more modern look&feel. If you search the internet you will find a lot of such posts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/eclipse/comments/i4hlpw/make_eclipse_look_modern/ https://www.reddit.com/r/eclipse/comments/jvfyv8/will_eclipse_get_amajor_ui_upgrade_to_look_modern/ ...
There is quite some progress in this area with simplified tab view options (available), sticky scrolling (in progress), modernized find integration (in progress) and many other small and bigger fixes which are currently being worked on in the Eclipse community.
This issue focuses on the default themes. The default light theme has not been updated in years. It is not state of the art anymore. All major IDEs have shifted to a different light theme style. Here is an overview how the other most commonly used IDEs look like out of the box.
VS Code
IntelliJ
Visual Studio
XCode
What design styles follows a theme in 2024?
When comparing the different IDEs it is easy to pick out the design decisions they all share. These are:
1) Lightweight view tab design. 2) Flat look. No use of 3D gradiants. 3) Views use a darker background color. This naturally focuses the eye on the editor area which is where most of the work happens. We like to call editors the main actors and views the supporting actors.
Especially, point 3) is important. When looking at other UIs outside the IDE space it becomes clear that this is the standard. The navigation sidebar is usually using a darker background color than the main content area (e.g. MacOS finder, Apple Music, Powerpoint, OneNote, MacOS notes, MS teams, ...). That's probably the biggest reason why Eclipse feels so outdated.
Proposal for the updated default light theme
The updated theme addresses all three points mentioned above. Here are some before/after screenshots.
Current theme:
Modernized theme:
Details Views tabs. Same minimalist design you can find in the other IDEs.
Editor tabs. Same design as in the other IDEs. The active tab has a white background which blends in nicely with the white background of the editor area.
Proposal for the updated dark theme
The updated theme follows in the footsteps of the light theme. From a design perspective it simply inverts the colors. This means the most important part is the darkest and the less important parts are brighter. When working on the dark theme we noticed that it was already in a much better shape. Our proposal simply cleans up same aspects of the current design.
Here is a screenshot of the IntelliJ dark theme as a reference.
Current theme:
Modernized theme:
Summary
We have been working hard on these proposals and were pleasantly surprised how good Eclipse can look like with the updated themes. Our in house developers have been using them already for months and do not want to go back to the old ones. While we tested them extensively there is still a chance that we missed some small details. Please report any issues you find and we will look into them. We decided to split the changes into three changes for easier review:
At the Eclipse Community Day we asked whether to immediately replace the existing themes or add them as new ones. All committers (@merks , @HeikoKlare , @marcushoepfner , @BeckerWdf , @HannesWell , @sratz , @fedejeanne ) we talked to asked us to replace the existing themes. We can always rollback the changes if there are issues.
As a final note, we focused on Windows and Mac first. This is already a lot of work. If these changes get accepted we will also look into applying the visual refresh to the Linux themes.