I have recently made the switch from using Zend IDE to Eclipse and PDT/Aptana for my jaunts into web development (read: every day of my career). While using Zend, I had ran across a post on the Zend Forums that listed a good chunk of different themes you could download and use in your Zend environment. My favorite out of the list was instantly the Ruby Blue theme, apparently from TextMate (although in my brief, brief time playing with TextMate, I never saw it as one of the options). Regardless, it’s an awesome theme if you’re into lights-on-dark for your editing like I am.

After my switch I found out that it’s either really difficult to do Google searches on Eclipse themes and styles, or that no one has really made much headway in that part of the IDE. (There is the TextMate theme for RadRails but I found it to be not exactly my cup of tea…I’m picky, sorry!). So I tasked myself with an attempt at manually migrating the pretty colors from ZDE into Eclipse, and wouldn’t you know it, the transition went pretty damn smoothly.

To get these color styles into your own Eclipse, just download the .epf file and go to File -> Import in Eclipse, choose General -> Preferences, select the file, and import. I recommend making a backup of your own preferences by following the same steps, only selecting Export instead of Import. I stripped out some of the non-color related stuff, but in order to make sure I got everything, I left some of the stuff I wasn’t sure about in there, so there may be a conflict if you have some of your own personal preferences (though I’m fairly sure I didn’t do much to my settings besides changing tabs to spaces).

» Eclipse Preferences File

Also, there are settings for both Aptana’s CSS/JS editor as well as the Webtools versions of those editors (as well as HTML for webtools).