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  • Author Author: shabaz
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Working with the Arduino IDE.. with a more traditional Arduino Theme

shabaz

If (like me) you’re a relative newcomer to Arduino's integrated development environment (IDE) but not to programming, then the icons might surprise you!

 

The icons are targeted for beginners, but I cannot tell that the up-arrow means open, and the down-arrow means save! None of it is intuitive to me : (

However, I’m a lot more familiar with Eclipse IDE.. I wanted Eclipse style icons : )  (I appreciate that for newcomers to Eclipse, probably some of the icons there don’t make sense at all either : )

 

So, I set about finding a suitable Arduino dark theme to start with, and then edited it using the Eclipse icons. If you’re curious how to do this for your own designs, there is a buttons.png file that can be modified with a graphics editor, and a theme.txt file that contains colors in hexadecimal. There’s undoubtedly more to it for advanced theme creators, but that’s all I needed to know.

 

Anyway, in a nutshell, if you prefer Eclipse-style icons, then here’s how to do it:

 

First, find the theme folder on your PC (if you’ve installed Arduino via the Windows Store, this is hard! Better to uninstall the Arduino IDE, and install from zip file. The path should be C:\Program Files(x86)\Arduino\lib and you’ll find the theme folder there. If you’re using a Mac, then the folder will be ~/Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Java/lib). Rename the folder to something else like (say) theme_orig.

 

Next, download the file attached to this blog post, unzip it, and there should be a theme folder! Copy it to the place where the old theme folder used to be.

 

Once you restart the Arduino IDE, it will automatically use the new theme! If you come up with new themes, please do share them : )

image

Attachments:
more-traditional-theme-v1.zip
  • in reply to 14rhb

    Rod,

     

    It is funny how this can happen, especially when teaching yourself. You tend to learn just enough to be able to do what you want and then stop at that point. I can remember teaching myself Pascal, I got as far as linked lists and then never any further. I never got the hang of sets. I found the book I was using to learn Pascal from many years later, with the book mark still in the linked lists chapter.

     

    Dubbie

  • in reply to shabaz

    Technology is like that, it keeps on changing, and over the years my experience has been that it only ever keeps changing faster - I don't think  it has ever slowed down.

     

    Dubbie

  • in reply to 14rhb

    Hi Rod,

     

    That's a very nice icon, since it shows the arrow going into the chip, so the direction is clear.

    I've just remembered another icon that's (maybe) pretty good, basically representing that it's going into Flash memory, or zapping code : )

    image

    Another one could be a the burning fireball, to suggest burning to Flash! I think old CD writer software used that too!

    Maybe reading Flash (not that Arduino IDE does that) could be a smaller lightning bolt (or a smaller chip icon), with a magnifier around it.

  • Hi Shabaz,

     

    I like this, thank you, and will be changing my Arduino IDE icons along similar lines.

     

    The only one I still don't quite agree with is the Upload, as mentions, Arduino doesn't really debug in the same way that Eclipse/ARM dev is undertaken. I looked at my MPLAB IPE package and it shows a nice icon, although it is for Program Download....this gets awkward: is there a difference when programming a device between upload and download ? I've always downloaded firmware to ROM etc.

    image

    Rod

  • in reply to dubbie

    I didn't know what the up and down arrows did until just now!

    Haha, same as you Dubbie, I use the drop down options - I don't think I even registered seeing the arrow icons before !

     

    Rod